Star Trek: Genesis
by Crazy 3ddie
Summary: Six months into its first five year mission, the USS Enterprise is sent to investigate a newly discovered planet that appears to an exact duplicate of Earth. Starfleet wants to know who created this planet, and more importantly, HOW. But Starfleet aren't the only ones interested in the secrets of the Doppelganger planet...
1. Chapter 1

**ANOTHER EARTH**

Catalog Star System HB22147

USS Constellation NCC-1017

Stardate 2258.43.2

_Beginning Day Forty One of our survey mission in this star system. Science Officer Masada has reported the conclusion of the outer planet survey [see attachment for complete report]. Crew morale is exceptionally low, partly because of the recent loss of Lieutenant Onayemi, but more distant because of what the EBC is already calling "The Vulcan Incident." Though I'm not sure "incident" is the word I'd use. Maybe "Massacre" or "Holocaust" would be appropriate. In any case, our expanded mandate feels more like a mercy mission than any colonization survey, though I suspect the Vulcans would be too proud to see it that way._

_We're still having trouble plotting a survey route because of this system's weird composition. Most of the large luminous objects in the outer orbits are remarkably low density, mainly composed of molecular hydrogen and noble gases. The denser inner planets are indicated on gravitic sensors, but thanks to the distortion from the innermost world-an L-Class giant, what astronomers used to call a "Hot Jupiter"-we're unable to get a precise fix on their orbits and positions. Three of the seven largest objects have been pinpointed within the star's estimated habitable zone, and one has a spectral pattern suggesting a possible oxygen atmosphere. Since that seems to be a good starting point, I've ordered Ensign Gambrelli to move us into a standard orbit around the candidate planet to begin our first ground survey. My expectations for this system aren't very high, but I'm always willing to be surprised._

_USS Constellation Mission Log, Captain Mathew Decker_

"Entering standard orbit, Sir," Ensign Gambrelli reported, only seconds after the ship dropped out of warp. Without the distortion field from the warp drive, the Constellation was just another free-falling object hurtling through space under the tyranny of Newton's Third Law. An array of dozens of magnetic nozzles extruded a thin spray of supercharged hydrogen blasted from Constellation's main fusion reactors at thirteen thousand kilometers per second. Senior Navigator Horowitz had programmed their insertion maneuver to drop the ship into the gravity well as close as controllably possible to the planet's orbital velocity; the impulse engines made up the difference in the space of about half a minute, and Constellation eased into a circular orbit several thousand kilometers above the surface.

A small fleet of automated probes immediately ejected from the launch tubes in the engineering section: four atmospheric probes and four orbitals, each programmed with a slightly different mission and designed to detect slightly different features of the planet. Constellation had arrived on the night side of the planet, so there was nothing to see through the viewscreen window. Masada's station, however, had a more detailed image from the infrared telescopes and the first lidar spectrographs of the atmosphere and surface features. The radar survey would take more time, a few minutes at most to map the surface and oceanic features, but for now early analysis was already underway. "It reads as Class-M, Captain," Masada said, "Sensors are picking up radio transmissions in the S- and L-bands, sounds like frequency-modulated and amplitude modulated radio signals. Recording to library computer for analysis. First probes will enter their search orbits in eight minutes, twenty seconds."

Captain Matt Decker watched the large circular screen in front of his science officer flash into a blank wireframe graphic. Over the next twelve to sixteen hours that screen would become a detailed 3-D image of the entire planet and all notable features thereof, but only the most general information would be available in the short term.

All eight of Constellation's probes maneuvered automatically on preprogrammed trajectories, instructed to adjust their orbits with a handful of navigational milestones that would make them most effective overall. The orbital probes, which had the loosest parameters, skimmed the edge of the atmosphere just to gage the edge of its effective surface and then hoisted themselves back into higher orbits, stabilizing at an altitude of a few hundred kilometers. Their atmospheric cousins - more torpedo-like than the orbital devices - simply power-dove through the upper layers of the atmosphere, letting compression and drag destroy their extra momentum. Once reduced to subsonic velocity, all four of these probes went into a kind of floating hover, each on an opposite side of the planet, suspended a mile or two above the surface on an antigrav generator where they could probe the terrain as it slowly rolled beneath them.

"All probes are now in position," Masada announced, twenty minutes later as Constellation began slowly to emerge from the planet's shadow, "We've got telemetry coming in."

"Geographic analysis," Decker asked lightly, "Any good camping grounds?"

"Coming through now, lateral sweep is almost finished. We'll have a full map of all surface features in a few seconds."

"Good. How's the weather down there?"

Masada gazed into the hood of the infrared telescope and panned the viewfinder over the surface of the darkened planet, with data from the ship's sensors combined with the thousands of megabytes of data from the probes, "Definitely Class-M, Captain. Scans confirm vegetation and animal life similar to Earth types. Large body of water, deep oceans... yeah... all around, _surprisingly_ similar to home."

"Hm... compositional data?"

Masada slid his chair away from the telescope to the gravitic/subspace sensor control on the end of his science console, "Probable Class-M planet, tentatively designated HB22147-C," he announced, making this an official report from the flight recorder's log, "Equatorial diameter, approximately twelve thousand seven hundred and fifty kilometers. Mass, five point nine one zettatons, density five point five three kilograms per cubic meter. Orbital period, twenty three point nine three hours-" Masada paused here, looked at his screen in puzzlement as the report was beginning to look entirely too familiar. "That's not right..."

Decker had noticed it too. He came to his feet and stepped a little closer to the science console, looking over Masada's shoulder as he began double-checking the sensor reports. Meanwhile, the alien sun had begun to rise over the disk of this new world, lighting an ever-growing blue-green crescent on the surface of this world. "Atmosphere composition?" Decker asked carefully.

"Twenty one percent oxygen, seventy eight percent nitrogen, one percent water vapor, argon, carbon dioxide and other trace gasses. Average surface temperature, three hundred and thirty seven kelvins, approximately one hundred and one point four kilopascals average pressure..." Masada now looked at his console in complete disbelief. "That _can't_ be right... one moment, Captain, I'll have to run a quick diagnostic..."

But Decker wasn't looking at the science station anymore. The rising sun had lit enough of the surface world that the coastlines of its continents were becoming visible to the naked eye, partly shrouded in a band of clouds, but in a shape at least as familiar as Masada's sensor readings. "Horowitz... call me crazy, but does that look like Africa to you?"

By strange coincidence, Horowitz had just been thinking that. He set the navigational sensors to take a lidar sweep of the visible surface and then enhanced the image with an overlay on the hud, showing the outline of the coast even on the still-invisible night side. Here, now, a slightly garbled but perfectly legible coastline stood out on the viewscreen, not just the coast of Africa, but the outline of South America and the Caribbean Islands, of Mexico and the Gulf Coast, Florida and the North American Eastern Seaboard.

"Earth..." Horowitz looked over his shoulder in amazement, seeking confirmation - or at least a smirk to confirm an elaborate prank - from his Captain.

"Not Earth," Decker said, "Not _our_ Earth."

Masada looked through the viewscreen and then threw himself back to his sensor consoles. "That's impossible on so many levels..."

"Yeah, it's impossible alright," the boot of Italy and the Swiss alps slid over the horizon, "But that doesn't mean it's not there."

"Another Earth?" Gambrelli said, breathless, "A duplicate?"

Masada whistled in amazement, "An _exact_ duplicate. I'm seeing cities, aircraft, roads, power signatures..." he paused for a moment and queried his library computer, then nodded, "Radio frequencies consistent with standard Earth languages. All the right languages in all the right places. Chicago, New York, Tampa... "

Decker's heart skipped a beat, "Orbital contacts?"

"I'm picking up... wait..." it would take more data than he had to get a definitive answer, so Masada decided to estimate. He directed the orbital probes to scan a higher altitude in co-orbital space around them, about where the global satellite network should have a densely packed ring of subspace and radio communications platforms linking the Earth to neighboring planets and moons and connecting population centers wirelessly with one another. When the probes failed to return conclusive data, he directed Constellation's more powerful sensor arrays to sweep the standard parking orbits where starships and space stations should have been in evidence. All three scans reported back in a matter of seconds, a report concise enough for him to conclude, "Scans show no signs of orbiting spacecraft, satellites or manned stations, Captain. Only ground and air transport. I'm also picking up some massive carbon emissions from major population centers. Levels are consistent with the extremely widespread use of internal combustion engines at a level not seen since the late 20th century."

"What in the-" asking the obvious question would get him nowhere. This planet could not exist - it _should_ not exist - and yet there it was, right in front of them, like the Lost City of Atlantis floating out of the mist.

And yet, Constellation was in now way equipped to answer those questions. The small survey vessel could afford only brief surface excursions to examine areas perhaps a few square miles in diameter, and then only at the Captain's discretion. Whatever they might find on the surface of that world would be just a momentary snapshot of a much larger picture and would probably raise more questions than it answered. For a mystery this baffling, Starfleet needed to the send the big guns. "Tatiana," he ordered of his communications officer, "Program a coded message for Starfleet Command, Priority One. Tell them exactly what we've found here and request a followup mission."


	2. Chapter 2

**ALL VOLUNTEERS**

Planet HB22147-C, Standard Orbit

USS Enterprise (NCC-1701)

Stardate 2260.51.7 - 07:58 hrs

Holographic displays and scrolling graphics on the transparent monitor constituted complete information overload to anyone in the room who didn't have a lucid, computer-like intellect. Such little difference it made, though, since those not technically savvy enough to understand the displays were not required to understand it anyway. Everyone knew this was a _scientific_ briefing, so the unofficial protocols of a Federation starship prompted a seating arrangement to reflect this reality: the Starfleet planetology team - all of them rookies and all but two of them actually graduate students - dominated most of the first row, while the cartography and astrophysics sections dominated the remainder of this and the second row. The entire left flank of the room consisted of a cluster of communications officers with Lieutenant Uhura as center of gravity, with Lieutenant Sulu on the opposite wing, holding court with a score of sharply dressed navigators and shuttle pilots. The assorted rifraff down the middle had no particular arrangements, since they were the least relevant to this briefing; a half dozen security officers and phaser room specialists, a few curious junior engineers, a token representative from the Starfleet Press Corps, and Doctor McCoy - in the geometric center of the auditorium - acting as the sole representative of the medical department.

The senior most officers held court near the front of the room, facing all others, in a position to either conduct part of the briefing themselves or prompt input from the "audience" of officers gathered around. These eight men and women represented the operating nucleus of this particular mission, and these all orbited around the personal authority of Captan James T. Kirk. "Everyone take your seats," the Captain announced, for the benefit of the three or four people still standing at the moment. The graphics in the holoscreen froze for a moment, snapping back to the beginning of the pre-arranged presentation programmed by Spock and Marcus for the occasion. "This briefing is primarily for the science teams and the communications sections. Tactical Section department heads, you should be taking notes too."

"Excuse me, Captain," Lieutenant Sulu spoke up from his territory of the briefing room, "First question, on notes. Is there any reason to expect combat action resulting from this survey?"

"Not that I know of. Why do you ask?"

One of the shuttle pilots, two seats behind and to the right of Sulu, spoke up, "I'm wondering if we'll be doing anymore dustoff-type missions. That terrain looks pretty hostile up close."

"Hold your questions for now. This is... well, it's a complicated situation."

"_I'll_ say..." Muttered McCoy, loud enough to be heard but quiet enough not to rate serious recognition.

Kirk handed over the podium to the ship's Chief Irritant, the one member of the Planetology team anointed with the title "Doctor" Carolyn Marcus, who took her place as if the entire universe had been waiting for her to speak. "Good morning, everyone, thank you for your patience," she began in that infuriatingly smug manner of hers, as if the meeting could finally begin for real now that she it was her turn to speak, "First a little background to set the stage. As most of you are no doubt aware, the planet below was identified by the USS Constellation during its colonization study two years ago. The Enterprise will be the first Federation starship to examine in this planet in detail." The first of several images appeared on the twin holoscreens, orthographic views of the Constellation on the left and the first orbital visuals of the planet on the right. From his seat near the front of the room, Captain Kirk noted with satisfaction that both images looked deceptively familiar; Constellation because it resembled an older and somewhat smaller version of the Enterprise, and the planet because even at a glance its shorelines and color patterns were nearly identical to those of Earth. Constellation hadn't been equipped for an extended exploration of the planet; like most starships, it was assigned to take photographs, maps, samples and reports. Only a full exploration ship configured for extended voyages stood a chance to probe the mysteries of this strangest of new worlds, and that's where Enterprise came in.

"As you can see," Marcus went on, "Constellation's initial observations raised eyebrows throughout the Federation. Apart from the visual evidence here," the left screen changed to a sensor readout, a pair of spectral analysis charts of the planet's atmosphere and lithosphere respectively, "early scans confirmed an atmosphere with ninety five percent commonality to that of Earth, with a crust and mantle structure of ninety nine percent commonality. It has nearly identical mass and dimensions as Earth, though a somewhat higher density in the upper core. The main differences are the planet's orbital characteristics: it completes one orbit in three hundred and two days, although its rotational period is no more than ten seconds slower than that of Earth."

Here Marcus paused, a silent cue for Commander Spock to pick up the pace on behalf of his own department that did was responsible for Enterprise' first assessments on the scene. For the sake of expedience, Spock omitted the parts of his report that confirmed Constellation' findings and skipped to the parts that Enterprise had found for itself since arriving here six weeks ago. "Constellation's report indicated signs of an advanced civilization on the surface, apparently equivalent to late 20th century Earth. The report included radio signals, electric fields and signs of air and space travel. Based on these reports, our first task on the scene was to evaluate type, intelligence and sophistication of the inhabitants of the planet. Not knowing what to expect, we began with an assumption that the population may also have been a copy in some way of Earth inhabitants and attempted contact on that basis. The results..." the right screen changed to a set of aerial photographs, changing in five second intervals, apparently showing every major city on Earth, "...were quite surprising." A choice of words that reflected the fact that every one of these photographs showed a major Terran population center lying in ruins, its buildings either imploded or knocked on their sides, bridges collapsed, roads and lots overgrown with wild vegetation no one had bothered to tame in generations.

"Our first assessment suggested the cities have been abandoned for approximately three centuries," Spock went on, "based on the rate of growth of the vegetation and the pattern of decay in the surviving structures. This estimate seems consistent with other environmental clues, particularly weathering and certain geological indicators that have begun to destroy older manmade structures. As for the reason for abandonment, early hypothesis included some type of planetwide cataclysm, likely a viral infection or bacteriological contaminant. The lack of widespread devastation ruled out nuclear holocaust or other similar scenarios-"

"Pardon me for interrupting your bill of goods, Mister Spock," Doctor McCoy snarled from his perch in the center of the room, strategically placed, it turned out, since at this moment he was speaking for almost the entire crew, "But aren't we missing the big picture here? Anything could've _destroyed_ the population of the planet, but we still don't have a clue what _created_ it in the first place!"

Doctor Marcus answered gently, "On what basis do you assume this planet was _created_, doctor?"

"You don't have to be a Vulcan to see that's the only logical explanation! What are the odds that another M-Class planet exactly like Earth would just happen to pop up in a totally alien solar system all by itself? And besides, last week the geological team found that both of the moons have a different composition from Luna, which means they didn't form from a primordial impact against _this_ planet. That means we've got two identical planets with two completely different histories. So, again, _what are the odds_?"

"Probability is not causation, Doctor," Spock chided, though at the same time conceding, "Although your statement _is_ logically valid. There is no natural phenomenon that could explain the existence of this planet, similarities and all. What's more worrying is the fact that our findings lay in direct contradiction of the Constellation's report, which indicated a thriving post-industrial society on the cusp of developing spaceflight technology. The changes we've observed could not have occurred in only two years. Hence our present hypothesis as to the calamity that devastated its population: that which created this planet in its previous form may also have precipitated its demise."

This seemed to take Doctor Marcus by surprise, though not - apparently - because her theory was any different. Actually, Kirk thought she seemed gratified that another expert on the ship had also come to that same conclusion. "In the end," Marcus took over, "This may lead us to a clue as to who or what created this world, and for what purpose. The possibilities are endless, as are the mysteries. But not to get distracted..."

"Indeed." Spock moved to the next set of slides, replacing both screens neatly. This one showed a life-energy astral pattern superimposed over an orbital photograph of the devastated Gaza Strip. "Global surveys of all local population centers found the destruction was not entirely uniform. As expected, certain areas apparently weathered the cataclysm better than others, and this lead to the discovery of pockets of survivors in isolated areas. This initially lead to a support of the viral hypothesis, since the surviving populations were in areas that - as of 1990s Earth - were economically and industrially under-developed and lacked regular connection to the outside world. Our most promising areas included the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in North America, the Gaza Strip under Israeli occupation, rural areas in Indochina and the Malay Archipelago, Cuba, Haiti, and certain African regions undergoing civil war. The pattern in these regions was for less ubiquitous destruction of population centers, however..." and Spock almost cringed at the thought, "... the survivors demonstrated a marked regression towards animalistic behaviors. Primitive social skills, little or no linguistic capacity, extremely limited intelligence and an elevated aggressive response. Physical abnormalities in these populations were common, but phenotypically consistent, suggesting an evolutionary mutation into a type of bipedal apex predator." The two slides changed now to orthographic views of two such specimens. The first, showed a tricorder scan of a scronny, clearly malnourished and totally nude male with shaggy overgrown body hair, the quintessential "cave man" of anthropological lore. The second, though, was a curiosity: only vaguely human, entirely hairless, with brown and grey spotted skin; its head was a flattened brick that housed a pair of small beady eyes and one gigantic nostril, smashed into a meaty torso between two beach-ball-sized shoulders at the base of huge powerful arms that ended in a set of disproportionately long fingers.

No one but Doctor Marcus and a handful of Spock's science teams had even seen this image. It sent waves through the audience, and set the security men stirring. The communications sections breathed a collective sigh of disappointment, since there was no indication that such a monster would have any desire to communicate with them.

Mister Scott made his first contribution from behind the Captain's seat, "That beastie's not from any Earth _I'd_ remember!"

"Quite right, Mister Scott," Spock said, "This, then, leads to the current state of our investigation. A thorough search of the remaining population centers shows only Gaza, the Congo Region and mountainous inland of Cuba and Haiti are still populated, in this case only by the two creatures you see here, with the latter in far greater numbers and appearing to dominate the former."

One of the communications officers - a dark-haired Orion woman who until now had been taking extremely thorough notes on a palmcomp - asked, "Is there any evidence that sapient life forms _did_ exist here? I mean, for all we know this planet was created as a hunting ground for some kind of carnivorous creatures."

Spock raised a brow, "A curious question, considering the existence of the ruins cannot be explained by anything _other_ than sapient life forms..."

"I think Ensign Ayala is referring to _indigenous_ life forms," Lieutenant Uhura added, "I mean... well... to the extent that any organism here could be considered indigenous."

"I understand." Spock folded his arms and thought it over, "Ignoring the Constellation report, in the past six weeks we have seen numerous indications that some type of civilization _did_ exist here not sooner than three hundred years ago. That suggests that even the original creators of this planet have ceased to be active in its unfolding development-"

"But we _can't_ ignore Constellation's report," Lieutenant Sulu said, "This planet was alive two years ago, and now it's been dead for three hundred years. It could gone through some kind of time warp, or maybe someone sped up the process just to see what would happen to them. I mean, for all we know, this could be some kind of huge sophisticated ant farm."

Spock stood up straighter, "I'm unfamiliar with that field of agriculture, Lieutenant."

"It's... uh... sort of an aquarium, Sir. Usually two flat panes of glass with sand between them... and they have... well, not real, but little plastic farmhouses for the ants..."

"The point is," Kirk rescued Sulu from his own stumbling, "The signs of civilization may have been placed here for the amusement of those predators. Like a castle in an aquarium or something like that."

Spock frowned, "That would seem to be a highly illogical use of time and energy, constructing the facade of an entire civilization simply for the... _amusement_... of primitive carnivores."

Doctor Marcus shared his frustration, but not his conclusion. "Until we know something about the intelligence that created this planet, we can't really assume _anything_. For all we know, it's a cosmic practical joke."

Doctor McCoy snorted, "Somebody out there's a got a hell of a sense of humor."

"In either case, that does not explain the presence of the caveman organisms," Spock said, "Or their relationship with the larger organisms, what the away teams have begun to call the Reavers."

"_What_ relationship?" Kirk asked. This was news to him.

"They are genetically similar in most respects, in fact more similar to each other than humans are to chimpanzees. Furthermore, they are locally coincident and belong to the same social groupings."

Kirk stood up slowly, "Then the Reavers aren't _hunting_ the cave men?"

"Based on observed behavior," Spock confirmed, "They seem to view one another as the same species, though the cavemen demonstrate a remarkably sedentary lifestyle. For confirmation we are still awaiting direct or indirect evidence of interbreeding between the two phenotypes. There is also Ensign Chekov's theory that the difference may simply be a matter of sexual dimorphism."

Doctor Marcus turned an accusing eye towards Chekov, sitting quietly behind Sulu, trying not to be noticed. "You think the Reavers are the female of the species, Ensign?"

"Uh... um... yes, Ma'am."

"Based on what?"

Chekov shrugged, "In my experience, Doctor, the female of most predator species tend to be larger and more aggressive."

Spock raised a brow, "That would seem to suggest genetic tampering with this species, whatever their original form. The mutation may depend on the influence of a Y-chromosome."

"Or a passive X-chromosome that became dominant somehow," McCoy said, "In some isolated populations, certain suppressed traits have a tendency to resurface. If those traits have an evolutionary advantage, they can actually overwhelm the dominant gene."

"Gentlemen," Kirk stood up, feeling the briefing beginning to derail, "This is all fine speculation, but what we lack here is _information_. There are that one basic question we're still no closer to answering."

"Indeed," Spock nodded, "The question of who manufactured this planet, and why."

"Most importantly, _how_," Marcus said, "at least, that's what the Federation Council wants to know. Needless to say, the ability to construct entire planets to a specific design is _far_ beyond Federation technology."

"For now, though," Kirk said, "we need to narrow down our priorities, solve one or two problems at a time. This planet has enough mysteries to occupy Starfleet for generations, but they didn't send us here to solve _all_ of them."

Spock nodded, "In fact, the specific priorities of our mission include an examination of whatever intelligence might remain on this planet, as well as a search for the intelligence responsible for its creation."

McCoy snarled from his spot in the center of the action, "And how do you propose we do that? Go down there and start asking the locals?"

Spock stared at McCoy, then almost as an afterthought back at Kirk, "I propose we should do _exactly_ that, Captain."

"They don't seem very talkative to me, Spock."

"No, Sir, they don't. However," and he raised his voice to make sure the rest of the department heads could hear, "on the assumption that some remnant of intelligent life may _still_ exist on this planet, it should be our priority to identify and preserve such intelligence for any clues as to the history of this world and its origins. A living specimen would be ideal, of course, but written or digital records would also be of value."

Kirk nodded, though he sensed something in Spock's voice that told him there was probably an away mission and a considerable amount of danger in the works some time in the next twenty four hours. "What's your plan, Spock?"

The Vulcan simply nodded, as if confirming that Kirk had guessed his intentions correctly. "Flyby scans of the Gaza Strip area show a relatively large population density of the caveman-type organisms co-mingling with a smaller group of active reavers..."

"All males, Sir," Chekov added, still partially hiding behind Sulu, "I checked the readings myself. No females of the caveman wariety."

"... which, if Chekov is correct, may indicate disproportionality in that particular population. If the changes are the result of viral influence or mass mutation, a pre-cataclysm population _may_ still exist there."

Kirk scratched his chin, "I dunno, Spock, Gaza was a pretty rough place in the 1990s... in fact wasn't it known for having an extremely high population density?"

"In fact, it was known for having one of the _highest_ population densities on the planet, coupled with perpetual guerilla combat against neighboring partisans and a proliferation of militant ideology. It is my belief that the high population density, coupled with the presence of armed reactionary elements and the availability of firearms may have delayed whatever fate consumed the rest of this world."

"That's a hell of a belief, Spock... almost a leap of faith."

Spock raised a brow, "Faith is illogical, Captain... however, in this case, it may be all we have left."

"I see." Kirk turned to the department heads gathered in the room, and as he did, saw the looks of dread spread across their faces, "I know how you all feel... I won't order anyone to go, but I _will_ ask for volunteers. First team to find what we're looking for might just earn themselves a nice fat promotion."

The looks of dread faded a bit as various officers weighed the the risk of dismemberment by reavers - or having their heads bashed in by snarling ape-men-against the possibility of a jump in rank. The senior officers recognized this as an invitation to pass the offer on to the ambitious upstarts in their own departments, while the junior officers - including Chekov and Sulu - mulled it quietly in their own heads.

"All qualified volunteers should report to the Engineering Ready Room at eighteen hundred hours tomorrow," Spock announced, "Be advised, this will be a prolonged away mission deep in the heart of potentially hostile territory. A degree of danger is to be expected."

**THE DESCENT**

Planet HB22147-C, Standard Orbit

USS Enterprise (NCC-1701)

Stardate 2260.52.1

Sixty five men and women were waiting for Spock in the Ready Room by the deadline, an eclectic mix to be sure, from various departments all around the ship and all from different backgrounds. As a Starfleet tradition since the Second Romulan War, every single one of these officers and crewmen were required to be a jack of all trades and a master of one, and assigned to ship's departments according to that one speciality in which they were uniquely distinguished. To this end, Commander Spock quickly divided them up to have the specialties more or less evenly distributed. With twenty six security officers (and nine others with advanced combat training) he split the volunteers into thirteen groups; three on each shuttle as a security force, one additional officer with a science or engineering background as operations officer, and finally, one member of Doctor Marcus' survey team as section leader. Naturally, the Commander personally took command of the one team that lacked a third security officer, reasoning he could trust himself to do double-duty before any of his subordinates.

Mission planning went smoothly enough, considering the prevailing anxiety of the volunteers. The team leaders picked out twelve landing sites on the outskirts of the Gaza Strip, just outside the crumbling wall the Israeli Military had once erected to contain the strip's one and a half million restless inhabitants. Once the away teams made landfall, the shuttles would provide air support, scouting the urban terrain for possible leads or threats and - if necessary - provide defensive support if the locals got a little too frisky. Each team head its own search sector, and the method of searching each was their own responsibility.

"This," Spock reminded them as the planning session closed, "is to be a forensic examination of the region. Any artifact, any recording, any book, any painting, anything that could possibly have been created by an active civilization is to be considered evidence. Also required is DNA analysis of any locals encountered, microbial analysis of the soil and food supply, and catalogs of additional flora and fauna to compare against present Earth records. Your _ultimate_ goal is to locate and contact any sapient life forms that may still survive in the area."

A series of nods circled the room. By now, most of the volunteers were either wearing or wrestling their way into field jackets and equipment packs for the flight to Other Earth.

"Any questions?" Spock asked.

No one replied, save Doctor McCoy from the seat closest to Spock and the rest of the team on which he had forced himself, "I don't suppose there's a reason you're planning this away mission like a military assault, Spock."

The Vulcan frowned. "If you prefer to think of it along those terms, Doctor, then your role as the analogous battlefield medic may be greatly appreciated. Otherwise, recognize that this mission plan is simply the most _logical_ technique available to us."

"If you say so, Spock."

Twenty minutes later, Enterprise's shuttle bay thundered open behind a forcefield curtain. Artificial gravity was shut down, and one after another the twelve active shuttles drifted off their landing pads and maneuvered gracefully into open space. In standard orbit, Enterprise was in purely inertial flight, orbiting the planet only by its native momentum and the planet's gravity; once the shuttles were clear of Enterprise, their impulse engines powered up, and mass suddenly ceased to be a factor. Within minutes they slipped gently into the upper atmosphere, held aloft only by the action of a few thrusters and a subspace field that cheated both the laws of physics and the tyranny of gravity itself.

Shuttlecraft Fourteen was the first to arrive, making a low-altitude pass over the Mediterranean sea as the sun set behind it. Mission pilot Hikaru Sulu checked their position against Enterprise' sensor plot and raised altitude just as the coast became visible on the horizon. It hardly defied his expectations: drab, dreary, lifeless, a kind of desolation that was anything but magnificent. The cluster of ruins that had once been Other Earth's Gaza Strip looked more like a sprawling garbage heap than the remains of an urbanized refugee zone. Even "Real Earth" Gaza never looked like this; this planet was as alien as any other world they had visited on training missions and simulations alike.

"I have a visual on our landing site," Doctor Marcus said from the Ops station. Paradoxically, too, since technically _Sulu_ was the Operations officer on this team. "Five kilometers due east, just behind that security wall."

"I'll make a low pass and scout our search area." He fired braking thrusters just before crossing the coast and then descended to just above one hundred meters, coasting on momentum alone. At some low velocity he didn't bother to specify, he set the sensors on full scan and swept the entire region below the shuttle, images and data relayed directly to Marcus' station.

"Wow..." was her first response, followed moments later by "Oh _wow_!"

"What do you see?"

"An anomaly."

Sulu glared at her, wondering of their illustrious science officer's penchant for cryptic remarks hadn't rubbed off.

"Suddenly I'm not so sure that cataclysm really happened centuries ago."

"What do you mean?"

"You see that?" Marcus pointed through the window, where in the fading light a few isolated flashes were becoming visible, like the twinkling of sand in the sunlight. "You know what that is?"

Sulu stared, but shook his head.

"Small arms fire."

"What, really?"

"If these people are using cordite - and I don't see why they wouldn't be - I don't see it staying viable in these conditions more than a few decades."

Sulu shrugged. "You never know. But it's something we ought to look out for, don't you think?"

"I suppose so."

The landing site was up ahead, clearly marked on the heads up display on the shuttle's canopy window. Sulu brought the ship in a slow descent towards it and started the landing lights in the passenger compartment for the away team to prepare for a potentially rough touchdown. "How long you think this will take?"

Marcus shrugged. "How long do we have?"

"We should setup the transporter modules as soon as we're down. Statistically speaking, ninety percent of all accidents on away missions occur in the first thirty minutes after beamdown."

"But we didn't beam down this time. What are the stats for shuttle missions?"

"You don't want to know."

"_That's_ reassuring." She watched him work the controls for a moment and the corresponding movements of the shuttle as it descended towards pale dust. Deep down she secretly admired him for being able to maneuver this craft so gracefully; in her college days she almost had a heart attack just learning how to pilot a conventional aeroshuttle, and these heavy shuttles were three times that size.

Fitting, now that she thought about it, since the starship that contained them was one of the largest that Starfleet had ever put into space. With a crew of nearly seven hundred hundred and an arsenal of the best equipment and technology Earth science had ever developed, the Enterprise wasn't a starship as much as it was a self-propelled flying city. Just this one ship could do the work of any five starships of any other class, no matter what that work entailed. Brand new ship with a brand new crew and a brand new Captain fresh out of the academy... "You know," Marcus brought it up now that she had a spare moment and no one of consequence within earshot, "When I came to the Enterprise I was told I'd be working under Admiral Pike. It gave me a bit of confidence, you know? Thinking that whatever else happened, we'd have someone watching over us with a proven record, someone we could count on."

"Things change," Sulu said offhandedly, burying the pain inherent in that comment, "If it hadn't been for your father, Pike would still be in charge of the Enterprise right now."

"If it hadn't been for my father, I never would have _needed_ to come aboard the Enterprise."

"Fair enough. Though much as I hate to admit it, he might have been onto something, what with the war and all."

Marcus suddenly looked alarmed, "_What_ war? The Klingons?"

"You haven't heard, I take it?" Sulu sighed, "The Andorians invaded Coridan two days ago. They've announced they're going to annex the north and south polar regions and part of that densely populated southwest island continent that I can't remember the name of."

Marcus looked incredulous, "Isn't Coridan a Federation world? Why would they do that?"

"They can do whatever they want as long as it doesn't violate the express will of the Federation Council. And Coridan isn't a Federation world, technically it was under the protection of the Vulcan government."

"And it isn't anymore?"

Sulu looked slightly annoyed, but cultivated his patience. "There _is_ no Vulcan government, not anymore. And even if there was, the Federation hasn't recognized New Vulcan as a member yet."

"So the Andorians are just stepping into a power vacuum?"

"Something like that. Actually, lots of different people have been fighting over Coridan for a hundred years, this is just the latest chapter in that whole saga." Sulu slapped the controls and cut landing thrusters, more abruptly than might have been safe. The shuttle dropped the last five feet or so to the ground, slamming on its landing skids for the hydraulics to bear the brunt of it.

Doctor Marcus gripped the arms of her chair in an instant of panic, but Sulu went on as if nothing had happened, "The Telarites and the Bolians will probably get involved to protect their own mining interests. If we're lucky, they'll just race to annex any ore-bearing parts of the planet the Andorians haven't claimed yet and draw a line in the sand."

"And if we're _not_ lucky?"

"They'll send their fleet to try and drive the Andorians out, and we'll have a war on our hands."

Marcus smiled, "It's good to know our rookie Captain has such competent people under his command. All the same, though, I'd still feel more confident with an experienced commander on the bridge."

"With all we've been through together, you still consider him inexperienced?" Sulu asked without looking up from his monitors, finishing the post-flight powerdown.

"Just saying. I'd feel better knowing the man responsible for keeping me alive actually knew what he was doing, right? I mean, apart from all that unpleasantness with Khan-"

"We've explored beyond the edge of the galaxy, stopped an invasion of blastoneuron parasites, prevented a full-scale war with the Romulans, intercepted a full-scale Gorn invasion and prevented the extinction of an entire species. I think the Captain's picked up a pretty long resume by now."

Marcus squinted at him, "What about his failures?"

"Those _were_ the failures. And not just his, all of ours. We're able to do our jobs because Captain Kirk is an excellent commander and a proven leader. And after some of the things we've seen the last couple of years, I think good leadership is something Starfleet could use a lot more _of._"

"If you say so."

"I _do_ say so." Sulu unclipped his restraints and ducked into the passenger compartment, joined Buckley and Kruzman in unloading equipment from the cargo pod, "Tell you what. If Captain Kirk somehow fails to get us all killed, you have to have a drink with me when we get back to the ship."

Marcus smiled. "That sounds like a safe bet. You're on."

- 22:50 hours -

_"Alpha Team to Enterprise, all mission teams have reached landing sites. We are beginning search phase one."_

Lieutenant Uhura answered, "Acknowledged, Alpha Team. We'll monitor your progress from here." This, of course, was the understatement of the day. Almost the entire bridge had been geared to support the ground effort; the engineering stations had been converted to mission control for the shuttles, along with the twin ops stations in the rear of the room that now displayed vital sign tracking of all sixty seven members of the landing party. The main viewer was ablaze with a real-time map of the Gaza Strip along with sixty seven transponder beacons, plus the locators for the thirteen shuttles and the half dozen aerial probes dropped in ahead of time to help the group coordinate their efforts.

Kirk watched the transponder signals begin to fan out, encroaching slowly into the strip in three-man formations: two security men armed with phaser rifles and one officer with a tricorder and a field kit. His main interest was on Spock's team, the command group for the entire mission and-by design-covering the most densely populated region of the Strip.

Tying in his own intercom, Kirk asked, "Alpha team, we've gotten reports from other units about small arms fire within the strip..."

_"I confirm, Captain,"_ Spock replied,_ "Gunfire appears sporadic, isolated pockets of activity. Indications are, its activity peaked some three hours ago and is now declining in intensity."_

Kirk raised a brow, "You mean the shooting just started?"

_"Sensors showed no evidence of gunfire when we surveyed this area a week ago."_

"Then whatever's happening now wasn't happening when we got here."

_"Correct, Captain. Aerial surveillance is attempting to identify the gunmen, but so far we are unable to pinpoint their exact location. Tricorders have been set to scan for cordite, and we are continuing the search on foot."_

"Right. I want regular reports every six hours. Enterprise out." Kirk closed the channel to the away team, then tapped the page on his chair to the tactical section, "Phaser room."

_"Tomlinson here."_

"Mister Tomlinson, set your number two phaser bank to a strong stun setting, planetary bombardment mode. Just incase the away teams need some extra support."

_"You'll have it in five minutes, Captain."_

"Kirk out."

"Multiple life forms conwerging on Charlie Team, Keptin," Chekov was reading it off his control panel, but the same was vaguely discernible on the viewscreen.

"Any danger?" Kirk asked.

"Hard to say, Sir, but there is another group of life forms moving ahead of them, passing Charlie Team now. The first group may be pursuing them."

"Advise Charlie Team to stay clear and continue their search. Meanwhile, continue scans of the planet surface for any signs of active technology or power signatures. Maybe somebody's still got a ham radio or something."

"Aye, Keptin..."

"Captain... I'm picking up a radiation surge on sensors," Ensign Rodriguez, the acting science officer in Spock's absence, reported from the starboard science station, "It's in high orbit, bearing one nine eight mark fourteen."

"I have it, Keptin," Chekov reported a heartbeat later, "Readings show an unknown wessel has appeared at sublight speed, moving into standard orbit."

This was all happening too fast. An away mission this size was already taxing Enterprise's logistical limits, let alone the unwanted surprise of an uninvited guest. "Go to yellow alert, standby battlestations."

A number of things on the Enterprise suddenly changed, even at a relatively low alert condition. The yellow alert condition prompted all nine of the ship's phaser banks to power up to standby mode, with gun crews and operators checking their power cells and swapping out any units whose reports were even slightly out of spec. The coolant lines for the main deflector screen were opened all the way, and the capacitors for the forcefield generators were charged to maximum capacity. Though not quite at battle stations, Enterprise was now in a condition where the full force of its power and technology could be redirected in a matter of seconds to the singular task of engaging and destroying a hostile force; not prepared for a fight, but prepared to block if someone should take a swing.

After several tense minutes, Chekov reported, "The alien wessel has entered standard orbit, Keptin. Inclination forty eight degrees, apogee of two thousand kilometers."

"Uhura, lock in on the alien ship, standard greeting and friendship messages."

"Aye sir."

"No intersect in our orbits," Chekov went on, "he may not be aware of us, Sir."

"Or he may not be interested, which is just as good... either way, keep an eye on the alien ship, I want to know the moment it _blinks_ in our direction."

"Yes, Sir."

"No response yet from the other ship," Uhura said, "Should I continue hailing?"

Kirk nodded, "Two minute intervals, standard linguicode. And alternate friendship messages with a request for identification."

"Aye, Sir."

And turning back to his science officer he asked immediately, "Have they scanned us?"

"No, Sir, but at this range they don't really need to."

"Same for them. What do you make of it?"

Rodriguez plunged her face into the scrolling lights of the sensor scope, reading telescope and optical sensor data from the ship's medium-range sensor array. The library computer ran an analysis routine against its own memory banks even as Rodriguez ran one in her own head. Both came up with the same result, "Signatures are fully consistent with Gorn technology, but no previous record of this configuration. I show modular construction, between one hundred and three hundred thousand ton displacement. I can't get a solid reading on its defenses, but its emission spectrum suggests some type of phase-layered ferromagnetic material."

"Can you estimate armaments, Ensign?"

Rodriguez squinted at her monitors, "Very few fixed emplacements, but I'm detecting several remote combat vehicles with heavy armaments on board. Consistent with standard Gorn battle doctrine... except..."

"Except what?"

She looked up at the Captain and frowned, "That hull configuration is hardly optimal for combat, Sir. Structural density is low, plus a lot of surface features that look like very large hatches or doors or something of that nature. If I had to guess, I'd say this was an up-gunned freighter."

"Alien ship has dropped something into the atmosphere, Keptin!" Chekov sounded entirely too excited for what his monitors were showing him. Kirk kept his eyes on Rodriguez and waited for her sensors catch up.

"It looks like a reentry capsule," she reported immediately, "ballistic flight only... ablative heat shield... about twenty five tons... no life signs aboard."

"Heading?"

"Um..." she worked her console for a few moments before the results came back, "If it follows its present heading, it will land on the western shore of Alaska, close to the Aleutian Islands. No present danger to the away team."

"Must be Santa Claus making a delivery," Kirk nodded, appreciating for once the novelty of an alien race whose motives were not saturated with wrathful xenophobia. On the other hand, alot of the more noteworthy academy situations were based on the worst-case scenarios dreamed up by a generation of long-dead explorers. It was distressing to think he'd spent all those years preparing for things that would never happen, or failing to prepare for things that would. "Bailey, you and Chekov monitor that ship, be sure to give it a wide berth."

"Aye Captain."

"Aye, Keptin!" the two officers poured themselves into the helm console now, and suddenly their workstations became a galaxy of holographics as they began programming escape maneuvers for every possible action the alien ship might take.

Satisfied, Kirk turned to the opposite corner of the bridge, "Uhura, contact Alpha Team, tell them keep their eyes peeled for any Gorn presence on the surface."

"Yes, Sir, but... isn't the alien capsule heading for the _other_ side of the planet?"

Kirk smiled, "They've seen us, and they know we've seen them. If they're smart, they'll monitor our landing party as closely as possible without initiating contact."

That seemed like merely a wild guess, but Uhura followed the order anyway.

"Speaking of which," turning lastly to his science officer, "I want you to launch two standard probes, inertial guidance only. Put them in a Molniya orbit with maximum dwell time over Alaska so we can cover that area at all times."

Rodriguez nodded and programmed the starboard probe bay. "Captain, at that altitude we won't get very detailed readings. We'll be able to track their movements, but..."

"That's all we need, Ensign. We're not out to spy on them, this is just a precaution."

"Aye, sir..."

Three minutes later, the launch hatches on the side of the "neck" of the ship irised open, each releasing a Starfleet observation probe into space, port and starboard. Both probes accelerated away from the ship under the drive of micr-fusion thrusters, ponderously slow without the benefit of space-denting subspace fields, but quickly enough to cancel their angular velocity around the planet and launch into an extremely elliptical North-South orbit.

Thousands of kilometers away, the Gorn ship took note. Not that the commander on board had expected his counterpart to do otherwise, and like Kirk, it was a relief to discover commonality with an alien - but not overtly hostile - intelligence. With due caution, the Gorn commander waited until Enterprise was below the horizon, then released another teleport capsule, this time on a much flatter trajectory that would bounce off the atmosphere and back into space before again plunging to the ground below. It would take a few hours to arrive, but that trajectory was calculated to bring the second capsule to a landing site on the eastern shore of one of the planet's enclosed water reservoirs, just off the beach of what humans would call "Gaza City."


	3. Chapter 3

**CHRISTMAS SHOPPING**

Planet HB22147-C, Gaza City

Stardate 2260.52.1

22:58 hours

"Surprisingly logical deduction," Spock muttered to himself as he closed the communicator. It was already after nightfall, a stifling darkness in which no creature dared venture into the ruins without benefit of a tricorder and an orbiting starship to support. The only lights visible were the faint pinpricks of tricorder screens and hand lamps moving through the canyons of crumbling buildings and ancient streets, the perfect lure to attract the more daring predators, or the perfect deterrent for the more timid ones. Presently, Spock's position on the hilltop overlooking old Rafah gave his tricorder an almost un-restricted angle on the ruins, and it only took a few seconds to chart a path through the ancient refugee camp that would take him through some likely points of interest.

A few paces in front of him, Doctor McCoy glanced over his shoulder, "What's surprising about it? Jim's pretty sharp when he needs to be, even when dealing with a notoriously hostile intelligence."

"Indeed." Truth be told, Spock never thought much of Kirk's intellectual abilities even after some of his most brilliant turnabouts had come to save the day. Kirk's command decisions didn't seem to derive from intellect at all, but from instinct, his propensity to automatically default to the most logical conclusion when all other considerations failed. This, Spock found especially perplexing; it was if Kirk was making perfectly sound command decisions entirely by _accident_.

"Aren't we at war with the Gorn?" asked Ensign Janice Rand, one of the three officers assigned to Alpha Team's security detail, from her spot just behind Spock.

McCoy shook his head, "War is what happens when two governments _decide_ to fight. With the Gorn, it's more of a reflex action."

"Well at least now we know what happened to this planet," Presently, Rand hovered over the Vulcan's shoulder with a phaser rifle in one hand and a tricorder in the other, apparently using the latter to calibrate the targeting sensors on the former; the targeting sensor on the back casing of the phaser was flashing error lights all the colors of the rainbow. The adjustments were consuming more and more of her concentration and at this point, even Spock was beginning to notice the sudden reduction of pace.

"Ensign," Spock asked disinterestedly, "is your life support belt active right now?"

Rand suddenly looked half a foot shorter. "Oh, uh... Yes, Sir... Should I...?" she reached down for the thick utility belt wrapped around her field jacket and began to fiddle with the controls.

Before she could do anything, Spock reached back and tapped a control on the back of the rifle, and the malfunction light vanished. Rand blinked a few times in confusion until Spock explained,"That button activates the field conductor for the phaser's umbrella."

"The... Umbrella... Right... What?"

Patiently, professorially, Spock explained, "The EM-102 combat phaser is designed to extend the forcefield envelope into a protective umbrella slightly forward of the emitter assembly. The conductive elements in the power supply must be activated first, however, or the electrical charge from the field will adversely affect the phaser's targeting sensors."

"Yes, Sir. I'm... I'm sorry, Sir, I'm still getting used to the security department."

"You'll find many practical differences from the personnel section, Ensign. And to answer your question: our understanding of Gorn technology is severely limited, but there is very little corroborating evidence of prior Gorn involvement here. Their previous conquests have all followed a logical pattern which is not in evidence here."

"Maybe they're here for revenge?"

Doctor McCoy said, "Maybe they're here for a deep-dish pizza? Who the hell knows? We don't know the first thing about Gorn culture or Gorn psychology. We don't even know if they have a unified government. For all we know the Gorn we fought last time were their equivalent of Khan Noonien Singh."

"That's a fair point... But _God_ I hope they don't come here."

McCoy chuckled, "Hope for a Christmas Miracle."

Spock glanced back at him, "A _what_?"

Rand smiled, "Don't you know, Spock? It's Christmas eve!"

"I am unfamiliar with that calendar reference, Ensign.

"Oh, uh... it's an old Earth holiday steeped in religious imagery and commercialism. It's mostly a celebration for children, gourmets and young lovers."

"Ah... similar to Halloween or Valentines day."

"Something like that."

Starting back down the slope, Spock followed the map on the tricorder screen as if it were a computerized treasure map. Rand followed just behind him, while Ensign Wells and Ensign Gallager stayed in step just a few meters behind. As they got to the edge of the town, their formation changed, with Wells and Gallager moving in front of Spock and making "leapfrog" progression forward, each one moving to a cover position as the other moved past.

Spock flipped open his communicator and stopped just behind Wells in one narrow alley on a downward slope, "Spock to Eighteen."

_"Eighteen here,"_ answered Ensign Meyer in the cockpit of shuttlecraft eighteen, now hovering more than half a kilometer directly above them.

"Check on obstacles ahead. Any life forms or other hazards."

_"Looks clear for the next five hundred meters along your path. Your target building seems mostly intact, though part of the east wall has collapsed into the building next to it."_

"The one with the satellite dish on the roof, correct?"

_"Affirmative."_

Spock flipped the communicator closed and batted Gallager on the shoulder, "Set your pace to five hundred meters and then regroup. Move out."

Gallager moved forward, passing Wells on the way and then crouching a position using part of a rubble pile as cover from whatever may have been ahead. As soon as he stopped, Wells advanced behind him - as did Spock and Rand just behind - until Wells passed Gallager and stopped at another position still farther ahead. Slow as it seemed, Spock estimated that at their present pace they would arrive at the first building in twelve point nine minutes.

So far - uninvited guests notwithstanding - everything was going exactly to plan.

Stardate 2260.52.6

- 0431 hours -

_Echo Team, location in Grid 17, day six of survey mission. Ensign Kevin T. Riley reporting._

_Nothing to report._

_I've just stumbled on the corpse of a humanoid male. About fifteen years of age. Partially dressed in some kind of khaki outfit that looks like a army fatigues patched together from four different sources. There is an old-style Kalashnikov rifle lying on the ground nearby. It doesn't have a battery pack, so I'm assuming this is a powder and gas-operated version. It must be the source of the cordite traces we came here looking for. The corpse is mangled, partially crushed, but I'm not sure by what. In the condition it's in now this kid couldn't possibly have gotten here under his own power. I'm a little wierded out by the fact that this corpse isn't wearing any pants. I'm documenting the scene with spatial and photographic analysis for forensic reconstruction of the-_

_Wait..._

_Tricorder just picked up a life form reading. Five meters away. Is there someone else here? Hello? What the f-_

Ensign Riley did not completely see the thing that was rushing towards him in the pale light of dawn. He did _feel_ it, though, as a curled up fist the size of a pumpkin slammed into his chest and knocked him on his ass some ten feet to the other side of the room. As it moved again it passed through a spot where sunlight trickled through a crack in the wall and Riley was able to see its outline. His first impression was that it was _enormous_; if it wasn't for the forcefield from his life support belt that fist would have crushed most of his ribcage. But that brief glimpse of the creature's shape triggered synapses in his brain that materialized the rest of it, like a transporter beam assembling a lone passenger from a particle stream, and he recognized the oversized arms and shoulders and relatively scronny legs to be that of an Other-Earth Reaver, that type of omnivorous apex predator that - Spock had warned them all - was an incredibly violent yet less-than-proficient killer.

Instinct handled the rest from here, the basic fight or flight reaction universal to every organism that had ever harbored a desire to not be eaten: Riley set a course for the nearest hole in the wall and pounded his feet towards it like a rabbit diving for a hole.

The reaver followed him, waving its gigantic arms dementedly like a bird flapping its wings out of synch. It was shockingly fast for something so bulky, but to no avail, as the hundred and sixty pound Irishman slipped easily through the crack in the wall. Well not exactly _easily_; something snagged a corner of his uniform he emerged through the crack without his pants. He landed on his face with his legs in the air, flopping in the dust.

The first sound he heard was the sound of Ensign Torens exploding into belly laughs. The second sound was a mortifying crash as the three hundred and sixty pound predator crashed into the wall behind him and thrust one arm through the opening with a bone-chilling snarl. That arm was almost as wide as Riley's entire torso, each spindly finger as long as his forearm.

Torens was still laughing, but now more from shock and surprise than humor. Petty Officer McCarthy said something unintelligible, and Ensign Doyle screamed like the leading women in old horror movies.

Despite the pain of his face-vault, Riley still had the wherewithal to reach for his phaser, theoretically still clipped to his belt on his uniform trousers. But the phaser was gone, as was the belt and trousers; all three were now dangling on the end of one of the Reaver's flailing digits, a tangled mass of shredded fabric and tumbling equipment that somehow managed to stay together.

Riley grabbed the belt before he could think not to; the Reaver snatched its arm back with such force that it almost dragged him back _through_ the hole in the wall with it. The buckle snapped against the concrete and the phaser, tricorder and communicator all spun into the air in different directions and clattered to the ground.

Another snarl and a crash against the wall and a three-foot section of concrete exploded into the alley, followed by the Reaver's opposite arm. McCarthy fumbled with his equipment belt in a panic before aiming his tricorder and pressing what - had he drawn a phaser like he intended - would have been the trigger until he tripped over a hysterical Doyle and landed on his shoulders behind her. Torens scooped up his phaser rifle and leaned into the opening, just in time to be plunged into oblivion as the Reaver smashed a section of the wall next to him and buried him in half a ton of reinforced concrete.

Riley found his communicator first, then fiddled through the rubble until he found his phaser. He snapped the weapon to its stun setting just as one last blow shattered the wall in front of him, brought the phaser to bear as the Reaver vaulted into the alley. He saw the dot from the sight beam appear over the target before he really knew what the target was, and as the beast lunged at him he squeezed the trigger.

For an instant the Reaver vanished behind the crackling blue flash of a phaser beam, and for a horrifying second Riley thought he had accidentally _vaporized_ the poor beast. But as his finger relaxed, the creature was still there, swinging its arms in the air in front of it, still very conscious if the growing intensity of its snarls were any indication. After a short disorienting moment it occurred to Riley that this thing was probably too big for his phaser to stun it; at this point he collapsed into a mass of panic, scrambled to his feet, and shot down the alley like a rocket on twin plumes of terror. Predictably the Reaver followed, snarling after him, swaying oafishly with its its massive arms slapping the walls every step it took.

McCarthy scooted to the side just in time to avoid being stepped on by the Riley as he passed him. Then he scooted aside again as the Reaver stomped past. A few meters ahead the alley opened into an ancient debris-strewn courtyard. Riley looked around for anything that might provide an obstacle; he set his sights on a narrow doorway off to one side, and made exactly one step in that direction before something caught his foot and he bellyflopped painfully on the bare concrete. Just paces behind him the Reaver picked up speed, screaming balefully as it went...

And it ran right past him without slowing down. Both of its arms were hanging limp by its sides, fingers actually dragging in the dust as it ran/swayed ahead, and now that he had a moment to think about it, its primal calls sounded more pained than angry. And as the creature came to the end of the courtyard - still making no obvious effort to slow down - it ran head-first into a concrete wall and tumbled unconscious onto its back.

Riley clambered to his feet and picked up his phaser. He thought about stunning it again to be safe, but not wanting to actually _kill_ the thing he decided against it. At this point the rush of adrenaline finally wore off and Riley became aware of three things: first, that the courtyard he was standing in was completely covered with relatively fresh carcasses, most of them stripped to the bone, plus a few mounds of dung piled up in the corners. Second, that a distant howling of other creatures was growing steadily closer as this beasts' family raced to its aid, which made sense since this courtyard-evidently-must have been their nest. And third, possibly most seriously, that his pants were missing and his boxers were soaked in a warm yellow liquid that he seriously hoped was rainwater.

"What in the cosmic hell was _that_ all about?!" McCarthy asked, running after him with his tricorder in hand.

"I was just checking out a corpse in that building," Riley said, catching his breath, "Then that blasted thing came out of nowhere and knocked me on my ass!"

McCarthy jogged past Riley, knelt down next to the Reaver and popped the medical scan head out of its slot on the side of the tricorder. "Blunt force trauma, skeletal damage... what the hell did you _do_ to this thing?"

"I stunned it, but it didn't work for some reason."

"I'll say. You shot it in the arms."

"Oh..." then Riley thought about this and his eyebrows arched, "Oh! Right, because these things use their arms to balance at high speed."

McCarthy nodded. "Probably panicked."

"Well, it doesn't know about phasers, it must have thought I'd poisoned it or something."

"I wasn't talking about the Reaver, genius."

"Oh..."

"Why didn't you just shoot it _again_?"

"Hell, I dunno." Riley sighed, partly for the fate of the Reaver but also for the demise of his favorite uniform slacks. "Anyway, good news for us, right? We've finally got a live specimen for Mister Spock."

"I guess so, yeah... where's the kit?"

"Torens had it." Riley looked back to the alley and a pile of crushed concrete under which the still form of Ensign Torens had moments ago been buried alive. "Hey Torens!"

"Torens!" McCarthy shouted, "You okay?"

From somewhere below the rubble, in a low Klingonish growl, Torens managed to utter back, "I hate you, Riley!"

"Yeah, he's fine." McCarthy snapped open his communicator and tapped in Enterprise' monitoring frequency. "Echo Team to Enterprise. McCarthy here."

_"Go ahead, Echo Team," _Uhura answered from orbit.

"Just had a close encounter of the wild kind. We've got a Reaver specimen here that might need some medical attention, and I think our science officer needs an ice pack."

_"Acknowledged, Echo Team... indigenous life forms are closing on your position, collect all equipment and specimens and standby for transport."_

"Give us thirty seconds. McCarthy out." he flipped the communicator closed, then turned to Riley with a grin, "Cheer up, Ensign, you're not the first man in Starfleet to piss yourself on an away mission. You're just the first to have it documented in a ground-team log entry."

Riley smiled like this was the most charming thing anyone had ever said to him and replied, "You're a bastard."

"No I'm not, I just really _hate_ you."

Riley sighed.

"C'mon, let's pack up so they beam us over to the camp."

- 0455 hours -

It didn't seem that Captain Kirk had actually bothered to decorate his own quarters. Lieutenant Uhura didn't know what to make of this, whether as a strike against or for him, although in fairness it was only by pure force of will that she had managed to customize even her _own_ quarters after the Vulcan Incident at the fleetwide pandemonium that followed. Ensign Chekov and Lieutenant Bailey, on the other hand, hadn't even had time to unpack, and Lieutenant Scott had been living out of a suitcase so long he'd basically forgotten _how_.

This eclectic mixture of opinion provided a seventh impression of the Captain's mindset that only reinforced the previous six: he was a man who didn't _seem_ to plan anything, even when he was in complete control of the situation. Which all in all was consistent with the spirit of this impromptu and almost certainly clandestine meeting in his quarters, in the wee hours of the morning when only the graveyard shift was on watch and the ship's civilian contingent wasn't likely to be encountered accidentally.

All four officers took seats around the table in the middle of the Captain's office, and once they were settled, Kirk took the most official part of the business out of the way first. "Bailey. Any changes from our visitors?"

Bailey straightened up and reported, "Their teleporter landed on one of the Aleutian Islands off the coast of Alaska. It's difficult to tell what they're doing down there, but we're tracking twenty to thirty individuals fanning out in what looks like a search pattern around the landing site. Rodriguez thinks they're focussing their attention on coastal areas, close to the water's edge. Might be surveying local aquatic life."

"Any response to our hails?" Kirk turned his attention to Uhura.

"None. I'm sure they're receiving, but so far they've given no reply."

Next, the Captain turned to his newly-anointed chief engineer, "What's your analysis of the Gorn ship, Mister Scott?"

"Surprising, Captain. They use alot of the same biomechanical technology as the Gorn we encountered last year, but the similarities end there. It's beyond the basic hull configuration - which, by the way, is a lot more efficient than the designs we've seen. They have a very different sensor and propulsive setup in that ship, some odd thermal management systems, some new equipment I can't begin to identify."

Kirk raised a brow, "You think it's a more advanced faction?"

"I wouldn't say more _advanced_. The technology is the same, just more refined, more sophisticated. It's like they're a more expensive version of the same product line."

Chekov nodded, "There are many different types of Gorn, maybe there are many different types of ships?"

"I've been wondering about that," Bailey drummed his fingers on the table, "You normally don't see that kind of biodiversity in a single species, even the ones who _do_ tinker with genetics. I mean, even the Suliban follow a baseline phenotype no matter how much they're enhanced. I'd bet my pilot's license that most of the Gorn we've encountered are actually a more primitive species uplifted to intelligence as proxy warriors. Like, the Gorn equivalent of chimpanzees."

"If that's true," Chekov said, "Our fight last year might have inwolved a very small faction of the Gorn species. Maybe even renegades?"

"Or it could have been a girl scout troop for all we now. We'll keep an eye on them for now, but speculation gets us nowhere." Kirk finally took his seat at the table himself and, anxiously, waded knee-deep into the purpose of this meeting, "Uhura... Are we at war with the Klingons yet?"

Uhura was both surprised and bothered by this question. Actually, everyone on the ship had been bothered by this same question ever since the circumstances of the creation and destruction of the USS Vengeance came to light. The Klingons had been understandably furious, and the Federation's blustering response hadn't made matters any better. But in spite of the ratcheting tensions, in spite of maneuvers and actions and counter-actions all through disputed space, the Klingon Empire _still_ refused to make the first move. "Last reports suggested some unusual fleet movements in the Gamma Hydra sector," Uhura said, "But nothing provocative. As usual, they seem restless, but so far they're behaving themselves."

"Am I imagining things, or is that behavior _completely_ at odds with absolutely everything we know about Klingons?"

"What do you mean?"

Scotty picked up the subtext and nodded agreeably, "The Klingons are a warrior race. They value strength and viciousness and have few other virtues except for their ability to copy other people's technology."

"And they never forgive offenses," Chekov added, "There is an old Klingon proverb: 'Revenge is dish best served cold.'"

Kirk flinched, "I thought that was a French proverb?"

"Pashtun, actually," Uhura said. Then something else occurred to her and she added, "Which... Well, makes a lot of sense, now that I think about it, since many Klingon cultures have so much in common with Pashtunwali... Maybe _there's_ your answer, Captain?"

"I don't think I follow..."

"Just a minute ago you were saying the Klingons are a warrior race, right? But there are subgroups of humans on Earth that have similar cultures, a proud warrior tradition that dates back at least as long. If some Pashtun tribesmen had discovered warp drive in the twenty first century, the Vulcans would have thought _we_ were a warrior race."

"As if a bunch of Afghan nomads could discover the secrets of faster-than-light travel," Bailey said.

Kirk raised a brow, "Well then, how did the _Klingons_ do it? I kind of see Uhura's point, the Klingons probably aren't a monolithic culture. _We_ sure as hell aren't."

"It could be that the warrior class in the Klingon Empire is spoiling for a fight," Uhura added, "But the reins of government are controlled by a more moderate bloc. Or maybe even less than that... Could be a subversive faction within the government that's secretly trying to _prevent_ a war."

"A Klingon bizzaro Admiral Marcus."

"Something like that."

Scotty shrugged, "Am I hearing an echo in here? Are we really about to decide that the Gorn and the Klingons - two hostile species that keep trying to kill us - oh, they're really not so bad once you get to know them!"

"Once again, Scotty, neither are _we_. When I think about somebody like Admiral Marcus being the head of Sol Fleet..." Kirk shook his head, "I think this is more about people than governments. I think we're being dragged down a rabbit hole by a handful of psychopaths that just happen to be on opposite sides of a border. I think that's been the root of _a lot_ of our problems lately."

"You think Starfleet's being run by a bunch of dangerous maniacs?" Bailey asked.

Kirk shrugged, "I think the _universe_ is run by dangerous maniacs. I think if you really dig deep enough all of the major wars and conflicts of history mainly boil down to a bunch of crazy people telling everyone else what to do."

Scott straightened up suddenly, "You're not exactly a picture of mental health yourself, Captain."

"Start worrying if I ever try to start a war with the Klingons. Besides, I've got Spock to keep me grounded if I ever get carried away."

Bailey snorted, "And who the hell's gonna keep _him_ grounded?"

Lieutenant Uhura cleared her throat. Bailey shot her a glance and then quietly retracted the question.

"Keptin," Chekov interrupted, "How would we make that work to our adwantage? If the problem being poor leadership all around..."

"People who serve under crappy leaders usually realize it when they do. I figure we can use that to our advantage. Not turning people against their own commanders, but it would be enough to get a little extra breathing room, a little more information. I mean, think about if, if the average Klingon isn't looking forward to war, you could get him to tell you how to avoid the ones who _are_."

Bailey rolled his eyes. "Because the Gorn are really gonna appreciate us having secret conversations with their armies of trained monkeys, right?"


	4. Chapter 4

**THEORY**

Planet HB22147-C, Gaza Strip  
Stardate 2260.52.6

- 1120 hours -

The ground teams had setup transport sites in a convenient locale near the Rafah crossing, within short walking distance of most of the search teams and strategically close to Alpha Team's landing site. Since then the camp had mushroomed into a shanty town of collapsible aluminum huts that made up the field lab complex, the scientific mecca for the away team to pool all of their findings and samples for analysis and decontamination before shipping them back to Enterprise for more detailed study.

For an all-volunteer team, Spock found their industriousness quite gratifying. Over the last three or four days he had actually started to grow disheartened from the slow progress of his own search, but stepping into the anthropology lab/hut for the first time he was struck with the impression that someone had given the ground teams the false impression that they were collecting artifacts for the world's biggest museum. The shelves stretched from wall to wall, stacked so high the supervisors had to use stepstools to reach the top levels now, with literally thousands of items tagged and entombed in hermetically sealed containers having been scanned examined tested and tried by every instrument the athropology team had at their disposal. He could only see the closest items through the clear plastic containers: children's dolls, books, handheld video games, posters, tools, cassette tapes, compact disks, and an astonishing collection of cellular phones.

Lieutenant York was fiddling with one of those phones when Spock came in, and almost seemed startled by the Vulcan's arrival, perhaps under the impression that being caught fiddling with an ancient device like this would somehow offend Spock's sensibilities. "Commander... uh... good to see you. Welcome... and you too Doctor," he added abruptly as Doctor McCoy came into the hut behind him.

Spock excused his awkwardness and spared him the trouble of having to compose himself. "Is that a cellular handset, Lieutenant?"

York nodded and handed it over, and now it was Spock's turn to fiddle. "Actually, it's a pre-paid satellite phone. An old-world precursor to our communicators. Nobody at the time knew what a huge precedent this was." York said this almost nostalgically, as if he was secretly channeling the sensibilities of that forgotten era through his supernatural historian powers. "According to the cultural computer, Palestinian youths made extremely wide use of cell phones for social networking, as did militants, politicians, even policemen. Constant warfare with neighboring factions basically shattered their communications infrastructure and forced them all to improvise. That's lucky for us, because all of these old phones used EEPROMs to store data in a non-volatile state."

"Which means it's still readable after all this time," Spock said, remembering Earth's technical history. "Fortuitous."

"Tell me about it."

"How many of these phones do you have, Mister York?"

"So far we've collected a little over forty thousand, and about half of them we beamed back to Enterprise already. Most of it's just routing information, but the real valuable stuff is multimedia: text messages, audio and visual recordings. There's also plenty of books, journals, what looks like a virus war between rival Zionist and Jihadist websites, some doodles and sketches on paper and cardboard, and a handful of videotapes shot on old-style VHS. We also found one extreme curiosity." York gestured for Spock and McCoy to follow him to the back of the hut, through rows and rows of artifacts and objects harkening back to a long-dead culture. In one corner of the hut there sat an object sitting on a small examination table, closed off in a stasis chamber to suspend any chemical reactions in the object without the damaging effects of freezing or desiccation. "This is what I called you about, Sir," York said, gesturing to a yellowed and brittle but otherwise mostly intact newspaper, "It's dated 5 November 2001. Look at the headline."

Spock pulled out his tricorder and let the system translate from Arabic into Vulcan. But before the translation was even finished, the photograph on the cover caught his eye, and he knew what to expect before the words even came through. "Judgement Day: Repent of your Sins."

McCoy snorted, "Of all the superstitious dolts..."

"An under-developed corner of an under-developed world. What do you expect, Doctor?"

"I'd expect a little optimism, not self-recrimination. Then again I suppose when this article was written they were probably past that point."

York nodded, vaguely sympathetic to the photographer who - having somehow snapped a photograph of a reaver tearing the hood off a pickup truck to the extreme horror of its occupants - must have thought the same thing. "Based on some of the content from the cell phones, it seems that these people believed the cataclysm was a sign from God that the world was about to end. It drove the rapid formation of an apocalyptic cult who believed they would be spared if they devoted themselves to religious purity before it was too late. They became rabid isolationists, sealing their borders from the outside world and imposing a strict religious code."

Spock nodded. "If the reaver mutation is caused by a type of pathogen, then an isolationist strategy would be the most logical choice."

"_If_ they did it for a logical reason, Spock," McCoy said, "That's just religious mania disguised as a survival strategy."

"But it _didn't_ work," York went on, "Based on the cellular videos, the mutations continued for a number of years. The isolationists lost control pretty quickly and the community split up into a collection of small armed bands."

"What did the paper say about the international response?" McCoy asked.

"It's hard to separate fact from propaganda," York said, "One editorial blamed it on a conspiracy of Jewish scientists, two letters claimed it was an alien invasion. The main article accused the United States, pointing out the fact that the reavers were first reported in the American Northwest."

"Nothing more recent?" Spock asked.

"Well, that's just it: there are no mass media sources after 2003, just text messages forwarded around by the isolationists and some angsty teenagers with dark senses of humor. Most of that information comes from a few thousand handsets that were reconfigured to operate in a peer-to-peer mode using low-power transceivers as a relay. As near as we can tell, all the phones reconfigured to operate in that way had much later activity logs, some as late as 2014."

"I see..."

"But Commander, there's something really weird going on here."

Spock raised a brow, "Define 'weird.'"

"The field teams did standard workup on all of these artifacts, tested for age, wear, radioactivity, and so on. They found a discrepancy here. The average age of most _wooden_ components is about three hundred years, but the average age of the electronics, the books, the posters, most of these are less than sixty years old. Now, that's consistent with our findings of these phones, based on proton resonance scans of their batteries and memory circuits. One device I profiled this morning looked like its battery had been discharged no later than twenty years ago."

"Fascinating." Spock looked at the newspaper again and let the tricorder translate the rest of the front page. Then it occurred to him that the field teams had probably already done this, so he turned to York again, "Have you scanned a transcript into the library computer?"

"Of course, Sir. Should be available through the Enterprise. By the way, we've had to beam down another twenty specialists to keep up with the load. That puts us at two hundred and sixty on site."

"Your point Lieutenant?"

"Well..." York looked down and studied his feet for a moment, then glanced up at Spock sheepishly, "Aren't you worried about the evacuation limit, Sir? I mean, two hundred and sixty would just barely fit into the shuttles..."

"The evacuation limit for this mission, Ensign, including evacuation transport capacity, is three hundred and ninety. There are also twelve un-used shuttlecraft still aboard the ship."

York nodded, "Still... don't you think it's kind of reckless to have almost a third of the crew planetside with that Gorn ship in orbit?"

McCoy raised a brow. "Stop being coy, Lieutenant, and say what's on your damn mind."

York sighed, "I just think someone... perhaps you, Sir... should mention it to the Captain. You know, just in case."

"Just in case the Captain is unaware that having a third of his crew on an away mission with an alien ship in co-local space is potentially hazardous?" Spock asked, stone faced.

"Well..."

"I believe, Lieutenant, that Captain Kirk may anticipate and mitigate potential hazards just as effectively _without_ the benefit of your valuable command experience."

"Yes, Sir," York sagged and pretended to have something really important to do with his tricorder, "I'll have that transcript available for you if you need it, Sir."

"Thank you, Lieutenant." Spock stepped around McCoy and strode out of the tent like a tropical storm passing through an island chain. McCoy followed, rudderless, not sure where Spock was going and not really caring except for that nagging sensation that had consumed him for the past hour or more than somebody needed to keep on eye on that green-blooded hobgoblin before he volunteered the away team for something even more irritating than an extended ground mission.

"Spock!" McCoy caught up with him just beyond the doorway and sidled up to his elbow in a hushed voice, "You hear that back there?"

Spock nodded. "The discrepancy bothers me. Radiometric dating should be consistent with all-"

"I'm not talking about the damn analysis. I'm talking about a pattern of morale. It's not just Lieutenant York, there's talk all over this camp and back on the ship."

"I have _always_ noticed a certain abundance of irrelevancy in human speech..."

"It's more than just chatter," McCoy's voice raised a little in irritation, "We've got officers questioning the Captain's abilities, questioning his experience, questioning his judgement, hell even questioning his dedication to the fleet. A while ago I had to treat a petty officer for a snake bite; he commented that he wasn't worried about dying, because he's sure they'd just give his son command of a starship right out of high school."

Spock slowed his pace and glared at the doctor, "General disdain for an authority figure is neither unprecedented or unhealthy, especially among humans. In fact, it seems to be one of Captain Kirk's most useful traits."

"You may be right. But disdain for authority can lead to an outright challenge. A captain on a starship sometimes needs to make difficult decisions. Now what happens if Jim Kirk has to order a hundred men to their deaths to save the ship?"

"Your concern _is_ logical, Doctor," Spock paused a moment and faced him, "For the time being, if you would keep me informed of any further deviations from what you theorize to be 'normal' morale conditions..."

"What _I_ theorize?"

"It bears mentioning, Doctor, that your experience on a starship is as limited as the Captain's. Having said that, no sarship in history has ever attempted a deep space mission of such long duration before. We may _both_ find the next five years to be... Enlightening."

Several huts down, Spock found his way to the forensic field lab, the largest compound in the camp with four tents adjacent to one another through sealed tubes reinforced with force fields. The main tent that held the entrance had the same chaotic arrangement of specimens, except in this case most of the containers were filled with old body parts - bones, tissue samples, hair, teeth - along with collection slides, fragments of clothing, utensils, shoes, bottles and food containers. Spock didn't meet anyone here, the DNA and tissue analysis was being fed directly to the library computer to be collated into something coherent for the final report. Instead, he made his way straight through the building to the door on the opposite side and stepped into the next hut, a kind of triage area that had been setup for _living_ samples - preferably sapient life forms - but had been otherwise completely un-used until this morning.

Doctor Ramsi Ayash held vigil here by himself, along with a single enlisted officer with a phaser, half asleep on a folding chair. The Reaver was sedated and restrained in a tractor field in the middle of the room, hovering some two and a half feet above an examination table that in the mean time held a small wedge-shaped device that made intermittent high pitched clicking sounds. This was Doctor McCoy's arena, and so Spock let him do the honors. "Morning, Ramsi," McCoy said as he took his place in front of Spock.

Ayash answered with his thin Arabic accent, "Have I got a patient for _you_! That navigator... what is name... Chekov, no? I have scored point for his theory."

McCoy smiled, "You confirmed this is female?"

"Double X chromosome, it is female. And I am just finishing photosection now. Those enormous shoulders there," Ayash pointed to the gigantic mounds that formed the base of this creature's equally gigantic arms, "They are deformed pectoral formations. You see this?" he pointed to something on the top corner of the "shoulders," something that Ensign Sulu had once compared to the horns on a samurai's shoulder armor. "This is mamary gland. Full functional, not vestigial or malformed. It having merged with shoulder muscles into single massive formation."

Spock said, "Would these creatures classify as true mammals?"

"It classify is true _humans_. This polymorphism is genetic mutation of some sort. This," he pointed to the shoulders again, "And this," to the arms and the long fingers, "and even this," to the squashed head and distorted remnant of a face, "this tissue is all malignancy, all the way to bone structure. I estimate seventy percent of the reaver's mass is actually cancer tissue."

McCoy looked at the creature in astonishment, "The thing is a walking tumor..."

"Mutation is a consequence of re-sequencing process, whatever process was used. DNA molecules are having normal structure and everything is blueberry pie. And then there is this," Ayash waved both of them over to a computer console against the side wall. A display there - what he was working on when they came in - showed an extreme close-up, probably nanoscale, of one of the Reaver's cells. Spock saw that the cell was in the process of undergoing perfectly normal division, with chromosomes dividing up along the spindle body, ready to separate into two new bodies. But at the critical moment, the cell seemed to reverse course; the spindle collapsed, and the otherwise circular body suddenly exploded into a shape like a mediaeval mace, spearing any nearby cells with its barbs. Almost immediately, the cell collapsed into itself as a shriveled mass of protoplasm, but the cells that had been around it all began to fizz and bubble like alkaseltzer tablets, then expanded, then quickly divided and expanded again.

"Fascinating..."

"What the hell could cause _that_?"

"I have not the foggiest. As I say, DNA replicates normally and everything is blueberry pie. Then suddenly the cell attacks neighbors, they turning cancerous, they do the same to neighbors, and not so blueberry pie. I have theory, but it is... strange, no?"

"_Any_ theory is valid at this point, Doctor," Spock said.

Ayash nodded in agreement. "This effect. It reminding me of experiment on Mars colony, say, forty years ago. Doctor Isaac Soong using transporter system to replicate organic tissues..."

"The bio-replicator experiment." Spock nodded, remembering himself, "Doctor Soong attempted to use a transporter system to dub the pattern of a living organism onto a mass of inert material with the goal of creating a perfect copy. Initial tests showed promising results, but his first attempt with a live animal subject caused severe disruption of the duplicate's genome."

"Even that was different," McCoy said, "the duplicate lab mouse lived for thirty eight seconds before it... well, _exploded_. It didn't mutate into some kind of crazy supermouse."

"Regardless," Spock said thoughtfully, "the analysis of the creature's cell structure _did_ yield similar results."

McCoy looked at Spock, then looked at Ayash, "You're saying this creature - this person - was _replicated_?"

Ayash grinned, "Doctor, this entire _planet_ having been replicated, no? Why not the people too?"

"The principal is sound, doctor," Spock said, "Given proper materials, a sufficiently immense replication matrix could allow for the duplication of an object the size of a planet. Indeed, duplication of massive structures may already be possible with existing technology. It is the duplication of details - organisms, geologies, cities, cultures - that requires more precision."

"Apparently _too_ _much_ precision since the entire civilization got some kind of..." McCoy looked at the Reaver, "Xenoforming breast cancer."

"It evidently lasted long enough for this culture to develop along similar Earth-like norms."

"Well..." McCoy thought for a moment, "The industrial fabricators on the Enterprise are the size of a grain silo and they produce finished products maybe two meters on a side. What kind of machine could have built a _planet_? Something that massive moving through space, we would have seen it from _Earth_."

"Indeed." Spock looked at the recording of the cell-burst play through again and studied the more detailed sensor notation scrolling on an adjacent screen. Which, McCoy had learned by now, pretty much left him off in his own little world until that analytical mind of his could be bothered with the more mundane effort of carrying a conversation.

McCoy turned his attention back to the Reaver, still held aloft in the tractor field. "Can I ask you something, Ramsi?"

Doctor Ayash said, "You just did, Leonard."

"Why didn't you volunteer for the search mission? I thought you grew up in Gaza City."

Ayash shrugged, "Gaza City today is not Gaza City of 20th century. And Gaza City of 20th century is not Gaza City of the Other Earth."

"Well, sure, but aren't you the least bit curious?"

"That is why we have history books, no? Besides, if I was that curious about home town, I would be tourbus operator, not Starfleet Consultant."

"Fair enough."

"I am curious about this one, though," Ayash gestured at the Reaver, "I sit and I think, if this planet is replication of Earth, then perhaps this creature is mutation of someone I know." he grinned, "This could be my mutant duplicate sister, no? She must having better luck on this world than on real one."

Spock glanced back from the computer console, seemed to think about something, then turned back to his work.

McCoy snorted, "If you can call it luck."

"Oh, I forgetting to tell you. Photosection of pelvic region turn up the good news. This Reaver being two weeks pregnant."

"Oh, wow." McCoy looked at the creature and grimaced, "The male's sex drive must have mutated to match."

"Not at all. I have profiled several corpses recovered from city center. Fifteen males, all dying from internal injuries. They being crushed while mating. And mutilated and partially eaten afterwards, so probably not consensual on the male end. After what happening to Ensign Riley, I am recommending male team members use much caution from now on."

"What _did_ happen to Ensign Riley?" Spock asked.

"He was attacked by this young lady here. I have not mentioned it to him, but his tricorder recorded the reaver's calculated attempt to disrobe him. I suspect the young woman probably would have stimulated his... er... anatomy somehow, forced a mating, then following normal behavior, eaten his intestines to prevent other females doing the same."

"Reminds me of my ex wife." McCoy sighed and moved back over next to his remarkably unperturbed companion, "Spock, I've got a sudden urge to leave this planet. Will you still need me down here?"

"No," Spock said tersely. Then after a moment added, "When you return to the Enterprise, bring the creature with you. You can conduct a more thorough examination using the ship's xenobiology lab."

"I'm not sure an examination would help at this point until we know how this thing was created in the first place." McCoy said, "And I'm not convinced it was replicated either."

Spock looked up curiously. So did Ayash.

"Think about our fabricators. They can't create things out of thin air, they have to have raw materials to work with first. If this planet was created, it had to have been created _from_ something, and the easiest way to do that is if your base material is chemically similar to your desired product. Now, what if this creature here was an indigenous form of life transformed into something not-so-indigenous? Its original genome might still be recoverable somewhere beneath all that programming."

"That is a leap of speculation, Doctor, but it is at least as plausible as any other hypothesis."

McCoy nodded, "Well I'll leave it up to you to find the answer, Spock, I'm a doctor not a detective..."

"Doctor Ayash," Spock stood up slowly and pointed at the monitor, focussing his attention on something he had been looking at for the past minute or more, "Do you recognize that?"

Ayash looked over Spock's shoulder, as did McCoy once he decided not to leave right this minute (and fully convinced he was about to regret it).

"If I did not know better," Ayash said, "I would say that is hearing aid."

"Hearing aid?" McCoy leaned closer, staring slack jawed.

"Hearing loss was widespread in the local population," Spock said, "A consequence of constant high-speed flybys by military aircraft. The problem primarily affected children."

"Then this creature was probably child during Israeli occupation..." Ayash looked back at the Reaver in amazement, "Three hundred years ago? How is that possible?"

"Either this creature is extremely old," Spock said, reaching for his communicator, "or this planet is extremely young."

"How could-?"

But Spock was already tuning in to his team's frequency. "Spock to Doctor Marcus."

_"Carol here."_

"Have you completed the quantum dating analysis on the coastal soil samples?"

_"I... uh... finished those samples an hour ago, Mister Spock."_

"Good. Save your results with due precision, then return to the test site in twenty minutes and repeat the entire analysis before returning to base camp with both samples."

_"What? Why?"_

"Just a theory, Doctor. Meet me at base camp in two hours. Spock out."


	5. Chapter 5

**SAPIENTS**

Planet HB22147-C, Gaza Strip  
Stardate 2260.52.6

- 1445 hours -

If the culture on this planet was as similar to Real Earth as Sulu thought it was, this building must have been an old mosque at one point. The signs were too badly distorted for the tricorder to translate them all, but he'd been to enough old Mosques - and asked enough questions - to recognize them as old Jihadist propaganda slogans, something to the effect of "Death to the Infidels" or "God Destroy the Zionists" and so on and so forth. Another two hundred years of cultural evolution would have sharpened that unfocussed militarism into the Al Rafah fighting style, even now the most potent incarnation of Earth martial arts; _this_ Earth, however, had been frozen in time before social evolution could transform the political tantrum of Jihadism into the more constructive philosophies that had become so indispensable to Starfleet trainees.

In that way, Sulu realized, this entire place was like old news footage of the Bell Riots: depressing to look at, but foreshadowing of better days ahead.

"Why _here_?" asked Lieutenant Kruzman, looking up from his tricorder screen with a slight wince, "The place was probably stripped down by looters."

Sulu shook his head, admiring the architecture. For some reason, something about the Mosque reminded him of the bridge module of a starship. It was intentional, of course, the intent by the architects to visually convey a structure of extreme significance to anyone who saw it. "Before the Enlightenment, these Mosques used to be the center of the Muslim social life. They doubled as community centers, meeting halls, lecture halls, they hosted militants, political rallies, some were even used as bomb shelters. I'd take a guess this is probably the first place the survivors would have gone during some kind of major cataclysm."

Kruzman conceded the possibility and turned her attention back to her tricorder. "Lots of material in there, but I can't tell what. And th-" she squinted at the screen and lifted the tricorder up a little higher.

"What's wrong?" Sulu glanced back at him.

"Funny. I thought for a second there was a life form reading. It's gone now. Must have been a shadow or something."

Sulu nodded and started up the low stairway to the naked main entrance to the structure. "Let's check it out."

"We have to meet up with Doctor Marcus in an hour."

"It shouldn't take long, these places aren't built with alot of nooks and crannies."

Kruzman followed, and the three security officers made pace behind him, waving their phaser rifles through the air and letting the targeting sensors see for them. The sun was already above the horizon, but this early in the morning the shadows from the ruins created dark spots in the most inconvenient places.

Sulu stepped in first and swept the place with his rifle's sensor incase something had been waiting for them. Nothing was, and now that he paid attention to his eyes instead of the targeting scope he saw _them_ at the same time as the slack jawed Kruzman, "My God! Do you know what these are?!"

He understood her surprise, but not the nature of the question. "They're just tents."

"They're not just tents!" Kruzman stumbled towards them with his tricorder as if the room was full of buried treasure.

"They're not?" he looked at them for a moment, sized them up for any special significance. They were all extremely _makeshift_ tents, come to think of it, apparently built out of some kind of animal skins suspended from ropes dangling from the ceilings. Altogether they amounted to structures that would never hold up to any wind or rain by themselves, in fact they served no real purpose except to conceal their occupants and trap heat. "They _look_ like tents." Sulu gave up.

"They're suspension tents."

"Okay..."

"No indigenous population on Earth ever used suspension tents!"

"I can see why. They seem pretty flimsy."

Kruzman looked at him annoyed and then poured himself into detailed analysis. "Suspension tents are mainly used by castaways, campers... People who wouldn't _normally_ use a tent. In urban areas, they're typically found only in post-cataclysmic societies, particularly societies where small numbers of survivors are trying to utilize existing structures. Sometimes they fall into a foraging pattern like hunter-gatherers and build semi-permanent dwellings in any structures that will support them, but nothing complicated enough that they can't leave behind or tear down in an hour."

Sulu nodded slowly, "So there _were_ survivors here."

"There were." Kruzman smiled at the tricorder screen, "Just as I thought. They were here pretty recently."

"If the cataclysm happened two hundred years ago, then these tents could be decades old..."

"Try _hours_." Kruzman leaned into one of the suspension tents and pulled out a long strip of something dark and leathery, approximately shaped like a large rodent but too distorted to identify the species. "It's a rabbit."

"I'll take your word for it."

"It's been cooked." he held it up to his nose and took a small, dainty sniff. Since that didn't yield anything useful, he took a careful bite, chewed, and then nodded in appreciation, "Smoked hare. Still warm. Got an aftertaste too..." he took another bite and chewed thoughtfully, "It's not bad. You want some?"

"Knock yourself out, I already had breakfast." Sulu flipped open his communicator and keyed it to Alpha Team's frequency, waited a few seconds for someone there to answer the call signal and then reported, "Charlie Team to Command."

_"Spock here."_

"Mister Spock, we've got a lead on a group of sapient life forms moving _somewhere_ in the strip. We've found an encampment in an old Mosque that's been used pretty recently. Wherever they went, I think we just missed them."

"Acknowledged, Charlie Team. Maintain your position and complete forensic analysis of the site..." Some two kilometers away, Commander Spock was in mid stride on his way up the steps of Shuttlecraft Fifteen where Doctor Marcus was waiting for him. He was met halfway by Ensign Riley and Ensign Torens, the latter handing him a palmcomp with a set of tricorder readings and genetic sampling data. Spock regarded the computer with satisfaction, then as a slight sting collided with his nostrils he regarded Riley with extreme _dis_satisfaction. "Is your base camp not equipped with a shower, Ensign Riley?"

The Ensign rolled his eyes before he remembered that Commander Spock wasn't in the habit of teasing people, then snapped to attention and said "Um... er... yes it is, Sir, but I..."

"Charlie Team," Spock raised his communicator again, "Recommend you begin a search of the immediate area and report your findings. I am diverting Foxtrot, Lima and Kilo teams to your location to assist you."

_"We'll meet them here and fan out in a search pattern. Something tells me our friends might be returning to this spot pretty soon."_

"At your discretion, Ensign. Spock out." he snapped the communicator closed and then turned his attention back to Riley, noting his torn uniform pants and a fading but persistent urine stain on the visible part of his boxers. "Please explain your dishevelment, Ensign."

Torens grinned slightly, "It's not _his_ fault, Commander. Riley here literally snagged that Reaver by the seat of his pants. The transporter room hasn't sent us a replacement yet."

Spock shot the Ensign a stare so chilling that all possible humor in this situation died in his throat. "A novel use for fabric, Ensign, although I fail to understand why your field equipment was not sufficient for the task."

"It's... um... a long story."

"Then I shall expect a long report." Spock took one step to sweep past them, stopping just long enough to say, "_After_ you have obtained a fresh uniform and a shower."

Torens and Riley both sighed and sculked off towards their waiting shuttle on the other side of the camp. "I think he hates me," Riley said, despondent.

Torens laughed and swatted him on the back, "Of course he does, Riley. _Everyone_ hates you!"

"Thanks alot..."

"C'mon, champ, I'll loan you my spare until Enterprise beams down a fresh uniform for you."

At the shuttlecraft, Spock bounded up the ladder into the passenger compartment where Ensign Rand and one very frustrated Doctor Marcus were waiting for him, specimen containers piled up to the ceiling. Quantum dating was tricky business even with the best equipment, and from the look of things Doctor Marcus had nearly exhausted herself trying to get a good sample. "Doctor-"

"Don't even start. I'm sure the first sample was fine, we'll have to make due with that."

Spock raised a brow. "Explain, Doctor."

Marcus sighed, "For some reason, I can't get a good reading on subsequent samples. The first test - the one from the community center - turned back three hundred and ten years. The second test turned back three hundred and forty, so I took another one and it turned back _forty five_. And then things just got craz-"

"I assume you used three standard methods of analysis, Doctor. In-situ measurements, remote measurements, and lab-control sampling, in that order."

"Well, yes..."

"And in those three examples, I believe your situational measurements showed a discrepancy towards extreme age where isolated materials in a laboratory setting demonstrated extreme youth."

Marcus and Rand traded glances, confirming the question.

"Fascinating."

"What does it mean?"

"I don't have time to explain how, Doctor, but I suspect this planet is in a state of chronological flux. Parts of it are aging more rapidly than others."

- 1501 hours -

Ensign Ayala kept her attention focussed on the tricorder screen and nowhere else, because if she looked up right now she wasn't really sure what direct eye contact would do to Lieutenant Onise's libido. If he was paying more attention he would have noticed that the Orion communications specialist had spent the last half a minute scanning _him_ instead of the surrounding area and therefore had an extremely good idea of his current physiological condition. Elevated heart rate, genital blood constriction, pupil dilation and respiration rate all pointed to a pattern that Onise was concentrating very hard on something other than making the rendezvous with Charlie Team. "Another eight hundred meters west, Lieutenant," she reminded him, pretending to be unaware of the Onise's growing erection.

"Yeah..." Onise was in dreamland already. She could have announced the arrival of a Klingon warbird for all the attention he was paying. And just her luck, those two civilian archeologists had wandered off again to take holophotos of some landmark somewhere.

"Is there a problem, Sir?" she asked, trying her best to sound hostile.

It didn't work, but at least Onise realized she was actually talking to him. "Hm?"

"You seem preoccupied, Sir."

"Oh..." Onise smiled as if she was a green-skinned beauty queen trying to conduct a publicity interview. "I was just thinking about something Lieutenant Olson told me before we left p-"

"It's a myth, Sir."

Onise raised a brow, "_What's_ a myth?"

Ayala rolled her eyes. Human males were so damned predictable. "That old story," she said, exasperated, "that Orion women enjoy being raped. Not only is this untrue, it is _very_ untrue."

"Oh... um..." Onise shank a few inches into his boots. "A-Are you sure?"

"As is the myth," Ayala went on as if she hadn't heard him, "that Orion women are half-feral nymphomaniacs who generate irresistible pheromones that drive humanoid men wild with passion."

"Uh..."

"_That_ is a myth propagated by female con artists who use neurotoxins to burglarize male victims. Of course, they spread that myth with no regard at all for innocent women and girls who don't want to spend the rest of their pathetic existence toiling in a life of crime!"

"I ju-"

"Incidentally, that myth is also propagated by slave traders, cretins and Ferengi as a convenient excuse for raping Orion women. And ever since _your_ idiot race got involved in the galactic economy, it's been a favorite campfire story of gutter-minded freighter captains who have spent too much time being henpecked by their self-conscious, unappreciated wives."

"Yeah... um..." Onise shrank even more, feeling a little like he just accidentally insulted her mother. In fact, for all he knew, he might _have_. "Look, I was just curious, okay? Olsen said he heard the story from an Orion merchant."

Ayala rolled her eyes. "Of course he did. No doubt a _male_ Orion merchant trying to make a little money under the table."

"Well if it's such a false myth, why do your people still spread it around?"

"Because, Lieutenant, I come from this primordial, fatuous, dungheap of a culture dominated by a cult of patriarchal chowderheads who made fortunes, for nearly two centuries, by selling their _own_ _daughters_ into sexual slavery!" Ayala spat in the dust and stomped it with her boot, a cosmic spite to the entire Orion race.

"Oh..."

"And because interstellar law being what it is, _this_," she pointed to the Starfleet emblem on the front of her uniform, "is the only thing that stands between me and fifty parsecs of horny capitalists who wouldn't know morality if it walked up to them and bit off their legs!"

"Huh." Onise sighed and leaned against the wall, muttering to himself, "Figures I'd get the one feminist in the entire Orion species."

Ayala suddenly pulled up the phaser rifle from the shoulder sling and pretended to look at its status indicator with alarm. She did, of course, let the guide beam paint a target on Onise's torso without really looking at it. "Hm... sir, something's wrong with my phaser. I think it might discharge by itself."

"That's not fu-"

True to her warning, the phaser did discharge - though not exactly "by itself" - in a short burst that hit Onise right between his legs. To her surprise and mild amusement, his shield belt hadn't been active; the Lieutenant screamed in high pitched agony then keeled over on his face and shoulders as paralysis spread out from his public area throughout the rest of his nervous system.

Doctor Bates and Doctor Adel appeared a moment later, drawn by the noise, and seeing Onise crumpled up in the dust stared at the Ensign bewildered. "Phaser malfunction," she said casually, "He's stunned. We'll have to carry him with us."

"Right, well," the two of them rolled him over on his back, Bates picked up his ankles while Adel grabbed his shoulders. It would slow them down a bit, but their main goal at this point was meet up with Sulu's team a few blocks away, so it wouldn't be _too_ much of an obstacle in any case. "Can you carry some of this other sutff?" Adel said, using Onise to lead his partner back the way they came.

"What stuff? Did you find something?"

"Russel found it. He wanted to get the Lieutenant's opinion."

Ayala nodded and followed their lead. It wasn't far, just a few dozen meters away where the two of them had been posing for photographs for the team scrapbook. There was a storefront there with a sign over the door, what her tricorder translated as _Ali Bukari - Internet Cafe._ This was more puzzling than almost anything else she'd seen in this city over the last two days. "Internet Cafe... some kind of alien coffee shop?"

"'Internet' was a precursor to the Global Optical Data Network," said Ensign Russel, leaning out of the doorway, "It wasn't very fast, but I guess it was good enough for the kinds of computers they had back them. And of course, unlike Godnet, it wasn't free."

This just raised even _more_ questions. "So... What's an Internet Cafe? Were the fabricators networked too? Or is 'Internet' also the name of a coffee drink?"

Russel shrugged, bobbling an enormous specimen container slung on his shoulder, "Hell if I know. But I noticed they've got alot of computers in that building, and I figured if we pulled their memory banks we might get some useful data."

"Oh!" Ayala looked and saw the specimen containers were indeed packed with archaic looking electronic components. Appropriately enough, they looked like larger and less elegant versions of a Starfleet memory card, and Russel looked like he had pulled more than a dozen of them. "You know what, in that case," she snapped open her communicator and keyed it to Enterprise' frequency. "Kilo Team to Enterprise. Enterprise, how do you read?"

_"Enterprise here."_

"This is Ensign Ayala. We've recovered some computer records from a... I guess a computerized coffee shop in town, a good amount of material to go through. I worry about carrying it to the rendezvous with Charlie Team, and Lieutenant Onise has been injured by a phaser malfunction."

_"Acknowledged, Kilo Team... um... you're traveling with two civilians... have Doctor Bates accompany the Lieutenant and the equipment. We'll do a transport relay to base camp."_

Ayala nodded at Bates, who was close enough to hear for himself and was already helping to set Onise down in the doorway. Russel handed over the specimen containers, and Bates sagged from the weight of it. "They're ready now. Lock onto Onise's communicator signal."

_"Locked on. Standby..."_

Some twenty seconds later, both Onise and Bates along with the specimen container were engulfed in a swirling funnel of sparkling lights, and then both vanished, whisked into orbit by Enterprise's transporter beam where they would be briefly re-materialized in the transporter room, checked for any ill-effects, and then beamed back to the planet close to Alpha Team's base camp.

Once transport was complete, Ayala's communicator beeped again, indicating a coded channel from Enterprise. Ayala picked up the message and casually put some distance between herself and the others as Uhura's voice hissed, _"Malfunction, Ayala?"_

"It misfired."

_"Phasers don't misfire."_

"This one did."

_"I can't _believe_ you'd be that stupid! Your record is shaky enough as is it is with all those fights!"_

"C'mon, Nyota, they can't prove it was intentional."

_"You better hope not. Gaila isn't here to cover for you anymore. If you loose your commission over thi-"_

"Hold it..." Ayala turned her ear to the wind, trying to recapture the sound that had caught her attention a second ago. It was familiar in a way that wasn't at all pleasant, similar but extremely different from some of the sounds her team had heard from a distance on the first day. At the moment, the sounds were anything but distant, and they were getting _closer_. "Uhura," she snapped open her tricorder and started to scan for cordite traces, "We're hearing small arms fire in the area. Do you have anything on sensors?"

_"We're out of position now, but I'll route your channel to the nearest shuttle. And seriously, Ayala, you've _got_ to watch that temper."_

The signal crackled for a few seconds, then the call signal beeped a response. "Kilo Team to shuttlecraft."

_"Fourteen here," _answered the most sublimely logical voice in the universe that could only belong to Commander Spock himself.

Ayala smiled at her luck, and meanwhile zeroed in on the source of those cordite traces on the tricorder, "Commander, we're picking up small arms fire close to our position. Bearing..." the chemical signatures were too far away to localize, but she could at least get a general direction, "... zero seven three, about five hundred meters."

_"I have visual, Ensign... Fascinating!"_

"What do you see?"

_"A small group of armed humanoids being pursued by a very _large_ group of Reavers."_

"Armed humanoids?" Russel leaned out of the doorway of the internet cafe, "Carrying firearms?"

Ayala nodded. "Must be the sapients we've been looking for... how should we proceed, Commander?"

_"The sapients appear to be moving in the direction of their Mosque encampment. Your team will connect with Charlie and Lima teams to provide safe haven for them at that location."_

Russel asked over her shoulder, "Why not use the shuttle's phasers to cover their escape, Sir?"

_"There is no guarantee the sapients will show our landing parties any less hostility than they show the Reavers. We may facilitate contact by placing ourselves _personally_ between them and their pursuers. Hopefully, they will interpret this as a gesture of solidarity."_

"Hopefully..." Ayala tuned back to Enterprise' frequency, and after a few seconds locked back into Uhura's bridge channel, "Kilo Team to Enterprise. Three to beam up."


	6. Chapter 6

**GESTURE**

Planet HB22147-C, Gaza Strip  
Stardate 2260.52.6

- 1522 hours -

To Spock's lack of surprise, it was far simpler to devise a plan of action than it was to communicate that plan to the ground teams. For tactical purposes, he'd elected to coordinate from the air in the shuttlecraft, high enough and far enough that he could see the mission area without accidentally drifting into Enterprise' line of fire or spooking the sapients away from their haven.

Spock reasoned that a proper defense of the Mosque Camp would require at least twenty men with phasers in good firing positions, but he also had to figure out how to pick firing positions that would be perfectly visible to the sapients so that their actions would be obvious to even the most imbecilic observer. On some level, he felt there was something a little unsettling about using Starfleet officers and weapons in such a blatantly contrived display of solidarity, but logic allowed for little other recourse. He could not use the shuttle's phasers, since there was no guarantee the sapients would connect the shuttles with his ground teams, nor could he rely on Enterprise' phasers for the same reason. Likewise, simply beaming their query aboard the ship was problematic for a whole host of reasons, not the least of which was the basic fact - given human psychology - that the sudden abduction of their entire group into a technologically advanced setting would generate a first impression of sheer terror that would poison any future dealings with them. It _had_ to be done this way: a gesture of friendship, of risking one's own life to save the life of a stranger. To humans there were few more powerful gestures, and with any luck these humans weren't all that different from their "Real Earth" counterparts.

Each of the seven participating teams were directed to their proper starting position, in well-concealed spots where the sapients wouldn't notice them. Once they'd passed, they were to take defensive positions near the Mosque and use phasers to keep the Reavers at bay, hopefully stunning enough of the Alphas that the rest would loose heart and look for less troublesome prey. Of course, in the event that this was some kind of feeding frenzy, Spock left open the possibility that the away teams would fall back to _within_ the Mosque structure and leave the balance of the predators to the Enterprise' phasers; after all, there were limits to the lengths he was willing to take just to make a gesture.

"There they are!" Ensign Rand was watching on the sensor screen next to her head, high resolution and high magnification as the first of the sapients came into range. The excitement in her voice reflected the importance of this find: eight days they had been on this planet, searching for exactly this.

And then, "Oh my god!"

Spock detected a new emotion in her voice: horror. "Ensign?"

"Look at that!"

He looked at the monitor, and to his extreme distaste, shared that cold rush of horror. The wave of fast-moving sapients was, in fact, a running mob of rail-thin children, mostly between six and twelve years old, making a military-style retreat down a narrow roadway, firing behind them as they went. He identified their weapons as Kalashnikov-types, though a handful were armed with shotguns and a few of the older children with bolt-action weapons with which they, more than their peers, seemed especially proficient. Further down that same road, the Reavers were in a disorganized rushing pursuit that more resembled a stampede of frightened chickens than the merciless feeding frenzy it really was.

"Fascinating," Spock said.

Rand was almost ready to climb through the cockpit window. "We've _got_ to help them, Commander!"

"We _are_, Ensign." Spock tapped the comm panel and put the general call to all teams, "Sapients approaching as expected, three hundred meters. All teams assume positions."

- 1522 hours -

Echo Team had found themselves a perfectly suitable spot, divided up between two rubble piles that had congealed around the rusted-out frames of old automobiles. Lima Team found an even better spot with better visibility, tucked in behind a contraption of tubes and leavers that was probably some kind of modified rocket launcher centuries ago. Bravo Team had to be directed to an overturned truck since their chosen hiding spot would be visible to the sapients after passing but before the Reavers were close enough and Spock worried about one of the children accidentally machinegunning his landing party before they realized whose side they were on. The other teams found their spots without incident, mostly in doorways and the stoops of partially collapsed buildings that were probably used by Palestinian guerillas ages ago for exactly this kind of military ambush.

At the three hundred meter warning, only Charlie team was still out of position. The reason became evident - as Spock could see from the air, and as Sulu had just found out the hard way - that the building they had taken position on top of wasn't nearly as stable as it looked, and most of the roof was about ready to cave in. A ten foot patch of it suddenly _did_, and Sulu suddenly found himself lying in a cloud of dust staring at a hole in a rapidly crumbling ceiling.

"The damn building's coming down!" someone shouted. It sounded like Lieutenant Kruzman, but with the adrenaline that suddenly poured into his veins it might as well have been Buddha.

Another section of the ceiling caved in a few feet away, and Ensign Buckley followed behind it. There was a sickeningly humorous moment when Sulu watched the man apparently land on his feet, then collapse like a pillar of salt as both of his knees bent the wrong way and collapsed under his weight.

Kruzman was more fortunate, or maybe just smarter. As the rest of the ceiling crumbled, he plummeted from the roof through the same hole Sulu had fallen through and missed landing _on_ him by handful of inches. That just left Ensign Rao, who was standing at the edge of that same hole staring down into it with a look of sheer awe plastered on his bronzed, pampered mug. "Rao, get your ass down here before you bring the roof down!" Sulu shouted to him, making it an order and not a request.

Rao did it without thinking, landing on his feet, but loosing his balance and spilling over on top of Sulu.

_"Two hundred meters,"_ Spock's voice flowed from the communicator.

Damn the luck. Fortunately, it looked like the rest of the building was stable enough even if the roof couldn't support their weight. Sulu pushed Rao and Kruzman towards a corner of the room where the ceiling was still solid - no sign of crumbling - then whipped out his communicator and keyed Enterprise' frequency, "Charlie Team to Enterprise. Ensign Buckley is having a very bad day."

_"Scans show two broken legs and a ruptured appendix,"_ Uhura answered from the bridge. _"We're locking on his signal. Standby..."_

_"Spock to Charlie Team. Your present position has insufficient visibility for proper defense of the camp..."_

"Yes, Sir, I can see that," Sulu answered, now that he realized the room he was in had only one door and a single row of windows that faced the Mosque and nothing else. Around this time he heard the musical whine of a transporter beam on the other side of the room and saw the glow out of the corner of his eye as the injured Buckley vanished into a matter stream, bound for the safety of Enterprise. "Any suggestions?"

_"There is a store front twenty meters from you around the northeast corner of your position. It will provide concealment from the sapients, but you will have to reposition to properly cover Flank Three."_

Sulu gestured for his team to move out, and almost as one, they did. Outside the door, Rao and Kruzman spotted the northeast corner of the street and ran around it, diving into the store front and crouching down where the remnants of ancient shelves and furniture would hide them from view. Before he got there himself, however, his eyes fixed on something on the side of the road, a deep depression carved in the ground that looked like a blast crater of some kind. It wasn't completely empty, there was something that looked like a dead animal of some kind lying in it, but Sulu imagined he could bear the unpleasantness just long enough to stay out of sight. He checked his bearings to make sure he knew which way to go, then dropped down into the hole and crouched down next to the carcass.

_"One hundred and fifty meters. All teams standby."_

Sulu checked the power setting on his phaser rifle, confirmed the "Stun-III" setting, then flipped open his communicator, "Charlie Team's in position, more or less."

_"I can see that, Mister Sulu. Standby."_

Sulu checked his tricorder with his free hand, linking up with the sensor feed from Spock's shuttle and the aerial probes. The Reavers had closed to one hundred meters, the sapients were closer still, and from the way they were moving it looked like they had completely given up shooting at the reavers and were now simply running scared. His first thought was that this would make their job that much easier since the sapients were less likely to turn around and shoot the away teams.

His second thought immediately rendered the first irrelevant, as around this time he discovered that the thing in the crater with him wasn't actually dead.

- 1522 hours -

"They're just children." Ayala redoubled the magnification on the scope. Not only children, but extremely _young_ children, between toddlers and preteens. They were moving in a ragged military formation that looked more Hollywood than experience, and most were firing their weapons in that frantic, squinty-eyed-style so characteristic of conscripts tossed into the path of cannons with too little training. They obviously weren't novices, but they were hardly the battle-hardened survivors she'd expected.

And then there were the reavers, waddling through the streets after them, their enormous arms waving in the air like meaty pendulums to balance their impossible bulk. They were ridiculous looking brutes, and if they weren't so vicious Ayala might have found them comical. "Targets in sight," she whispered into her communicator from her balcony perch. Russel had helped pick this spot out, second story of a rotting apartment building next to a dangerous looking rubble pile that was just stable enough to climb down if they didn't land on it two hard. With Onise still stunned they were a man short, not that it mattered in a situation like this. "You sure you want to take them from here?" Russel asked, "We'll be in trouble if they come up after us."

"They won't. They're all instinct and emotion, not much for strategy."

"Heh." Russel checked his power levels and squatted down behind her, "Well, _you're_ the expert."

"Shut up, Russel..." there was a crashing sound off to one side, around a corner closer to the Mosque. Ayala turned that way and saw several humanoid figures on top of a rising dust cloud... then several of those figures dropped into the midst of it and vanished. "Oh my God..." she snapped out her communicator and called "Kilo Team to Charlie Team. What just happened to you?"

Static at first, then a low pitched beep to indicate a contact code but no direct response, save that from Mister Spock on the all-team channel,_ "Two hundred meters."_

Ayala flipped open the cover. The communicator's tiny screen showed their three positions on an overhead map of the area, and at the same time, showed one of the four fading out as a transporter beam whisked him away to orbit.

"Building must have fallen in..."

_"Spock to all units. Charlie Team has repositioned near Flank Three. Kilo and Lima teams, you're to concentrate fire in your sections for three minutes, then fall back - if possible - to cover open position Flank Two."_

"Kilo Team, acknowledged..." A burst of machinegun fire erupted extremely close. Ayala looked down the street and saw two teenagers standing on top of an overturned truck, one holding an ammunition belt as the other fired a .50 caliber machinegun mounted on the axle of the truck like a gun nest. They had remarkably good position there, enough angle to fire over the heads of their comrades and still keep the reavers at bay. A planned strategy, from the look of things.

Or so Ayala thought. Someone in the middle of the retreating formation began waving their arms in a frantic "stop!" motion, and then the shooting ceased. Too late, though, as the sudden clatter of sound from both sides had converted a dozen of the children from an orderly withdrawal to a state of panic, many dropping their guns and falling into a sprint in no particular direction. The Reavers tracked them as they lost cohesion, and those fallen to panic were quickly enveloped by piles of waving arms and long clawing fingers. A scream trickled out of the bedlam, followed by thick blood spray as one of the the children was torn clean in half by the predators.

Russel gagged and tried not to vomit. Ayala's finger tickled the trigger, but she forced herself not to shoot. If she opened up now, there'd be no protecting any of them.

The silver lining became that pouncing on the few stragglers had slowed the Reavers' advance. The sapients now ran like the frightened children they were, none of them even daring to look back let alone shoot at their pursuers. A few of the reavers saw fast-moving bodies and resumed the chase; they were much faster than the children, but their prey had a head start.

_"One hundred and fifty meters. All teams stand by."_

_"Charlie Team's in position, more or less."_

_"I can see that, Mister Sulu. Standby."_

"Remember, you'll have to hit center of mass to stun them. Extremities won't cut it." Ayala squatted down lower to make sure the children couldn't see her. The machinegun opened fire again and this time kept firing. The children ran right past it, and the Reavers began to collapse in stride as projectiles the size of hypo sprays ripped into the mass of them. She noted with a sinking sensation that the machinegun nest was too far ahead for her to cover it, and hoped anxiously that the kids running that post were smart enough to run for it when their friends had passed them.

_"One hundred meters,"_ Spock said.

The last of the children passed the machinegun nest. The kid holding the ammunition belt jumped down and ran after them, but the boy behind the gun remained, firing wildly into the approaching stampede. The line of reavers converged directly on him, their snarling trippling in intensity while his comrade tried to flee.

_"Fifty meters. All units, engage on my mark."_

A single shot rang out from below. Then another... then a third... five shots in under ten seconds, and extremely close to them. Russel followed the sound to a robed figure crouching on the rubble pile just a few feet from them, shouldering a Soviet SKS rifle with some kind of telescope duct-taped to the back of it. He recognized it as the same figure that had waved at the machinegunners before. A girl from the look of it, much older than all the others. The kid from the gun belt kept up his pace, and every time a reaver would come close to him the girl on the rubble pile fired off a single shot, hit her target right between its beady little eyes, buying her comrade another five seconds to live.

_"Protective range... mark. All sections, begin firing."_

Ayala popped up and discharged her phaser rifle across the machinegunner's nose. Two Reavers ran through the blue-white phaser beam on their way to tackle him, and both lost muscle control and instead plowed head first into the side of the truck. The kid behind the gun hesitated, and thanked his good fortune a moment too long; Ayala fired again, but the Reaver was already jumping, and one swing of its enormous arm swatted his head clean off his shoulders. Meanwhile, the girl on the rubble pile spun around and saw Russel and Ayala standing there, firing off their phaser rifles at the approaching stampede. She stared at then just long enough to determine that they weren't about to _eat_ her, and since this basic fact defined them as "friend," she tossed the gun over her shoulder and took off running after her peers.

A dozen phasers opened up at once now, quick bursts against carefully selected targets, through each Reaver's center of mass. The streets were ablaze with fiery blue light, and the closer they got to the Mosque, the more the children began to slow, looking back over their shoulders wondering who or what had finally come for them.

- 1523 hours -

It was trying hard to _look_ like it was dead, but it was undeniably alive. It's eyes were closed, its mouth slightly open, breathing softly to make as little sound as possible. This gave Sulu pause, not to mention a cold sweat, and he performed _his_ first instinct and also pretended to be dead.

_"One hundred meters."_

The creature blinked at the sound of the communicator. As its eyes flicked open, it caught Sulu's gaze for an instant and then quickly closed both eyes shut again. Then it carefully opened one eye, seemed to realize it had been noticed and then turned _both_ of its eyes - but not its head - and stared at him. Sulu stared back, and the two lay there, staring at each other out of the corners of their eyes, each waiting for the other to make a move. Sulu held his breath; the thing next to him did the same.

_"Fifty meters. All units, engage on my mark."_

Sulu coughed.

The creature blinked, then made a small cooing noise that might have been an attempt to speak.

"H-Hello... I um... I didn't see you there."

It blinked again, slowly this time. Something electronic and very powerful sounding whistled under his feet, and Sulu looked down to see a row of blinking indicator lights flashing in some kind of sequence. The lights were mounted on something attached to the creature's ankle like a bracelet.

That was confusing on _so many_ levels.

_"Protective range. All sections, begin firing."_

"I'm supposed to crawl out of this hole now, so don't freak out when I do..."

The creature blinked again, and this time made a low, semi-musical rumbling sound.

Overhead, the sound of a dozen phasers crackled through the air, but much closer came a voice almost directly in Sulu's ear, _"Why? What's going on?"_ the voice came from his communicator: a generic computer-generated translation of what the databanks calculated the creature was probably saying to him.

That was confusing on even more levels. The sound of phaser fire overhead was suddenly light years away. "You have a translator?"

_"Translator... yes. Do you?"_

"Yes."

_"That is interesting_."

Sulu took a shot in the dark and asked, "You're from that ship that entered orbit a week ago, aren't you?"

_"My ship entered orbit recently. Yes."_

"Why are you here?"

_"Mission."_

"What mission?"

_"Orders."_

Phaser sounds intensified around them, followed by the shrieks of dozens of surprised and pained Reavers as finely-tuned energy pulses scrambled their collective nervous systems. They were getting close, in fact without looking out of the hole Sulu realized his position had probably been overrun by them already. Popping up now would make no difference except to run, as fast as he could, to the safety of the mosque before the beasts could pummel him to death.

He didn't really know the protocol for first-contact scenarios, much less first contact in a foxhole in the middle of a firefight. Since this creature didn't seem like it was going to _eat_ him, at the very least he could count on getting a few basic contact principles established. "My name is Hikaru Sulu. My species is known as Human. We come from a planet called Earth."

_"Human?"_

"Yes."

_"Earth?"_

"Yes."

_"Here?"_

Sulu squinted at it, "No, not here."

_"Your planet... is..."_

"Earth."

The creature made its largest movement yet, turned to face Sulu in the crater so he could see all of it. It was obviously bipedal, wearing some kind of form-fitting uniform that showed off a compact but muscular frame perhaps five feet tall when fully erect. From what Sulu could see it had thick scaly skin and a long flexible neck that ended in a reptilian head set by a pair of powerful jaws and broad, yellow eyes. It reminded Sulu of a kind of anthropomorphic gecko; not nearly as scary as the reavers, in fact it might even make a good pet if it wasn't obviously sentient. _"What planet do you call this?"_

It took him a moment to realize what this thing was asking him. The implication made his hands shake. "We have no name for it yet... this planet is..." he took a breath and narrowed himself down to the most relevant thoughts he could arrange, "We came here to because this planet is completely identical to ours. Our mission is to find out who created it and why."

_"Planet... created...?"_

Sulu continued carefully, "Yes, created. This planet is a copy of our world. There are a few small differences, but it's definitely a duplicate."

_"Copy. Duplicate."_ The creature briefly lowered its head on its long neck and then tilted it completely horizontal, probably its equivalent of a nod. Overhead, the shrieking of Reavers and the whistling crack of phaser blasts tripled in intensity before it began to rapidly fade towards silence.

"What about you?" Sulu asked, "What is your name?"

It blinked a few times, processing the question. Then it answered ponderously, _"I am Fifth and Twelve cycle the Runner."_

Sulu blinked slowly, "That's... um... an interesting name. What species are you?"

_"To outsiders, we are called Gorn. We come here for orders."_

"What are your orders?"

_"I do not know. I have not ordered yet."_

In any other time and place, Sulu would have interpreted that as a joke. Here in a foxhole with a sentient hyper-gecko, nothing would have surprised him. "You mean a _dinner_ order?"

_"Dinner... is... meal? Yes."_

"What kind of things do you eat?"

_"Tailed Water Claw, Small Water Claw, Many Leg Worm, Eight Leg Trapper, Poison Tailed Claw, Pollinating Hive Fly."_

Sulu picked up on the pattern and guessed, "You're an insectivore?"

The creature made its strange shrugging motion, and this time Sulu was sure it was nodding. _"Yes. We come now to investigate change."_

"A change in... the planet or the animals?"

_"A change in planet... a change in people. When we first came there were cities and lights. We came quietly, take our orders without being seen. On the fourth cycle after, another ship returned, and cities were ancient, the lights were gone. Many creatures gone, but many more have changed. We have come to take our last orders from this planet before it comes to ruin."_

"So your ship is... what? A fishing vessel?"

The Gorn blinked, but didn't answer the question. It didn't even seem to understand it.

"My ship is called the Enterprise. It's a Federation starship, designed for deep space exploration and reconnaissance."

The Gorn responded in kind, _"My ship is called Francium. It is designed for killing and recovering."_

"Killing what?"

_"Our meals, our criminals, our enemies. We bring these back to our harbor."_

"Is Francium a... warship?"

Again, the Gorn blinked stupidly. This could be a good sign if the Gorn had no concept of war or ships dedicated to fight them, or a bad sign if Gorn motivations were so alien that their equivalent of war was incomprehensible to even the translator's logic circuits. The latter was far more likely considering what Starfleet already knew about the Gorn and their seemingly warlike nature. "How many years have you been coming to this planet?"

The Gorn processed the question for a moment, as did the translator. It apparently did a conversion between Terran years and Gorn "cycles" and came up with the answer, _"The first ship arrived three years ago. Fourteen months later, this planet was dead."_


	7. Chapter 7

**MIRI**

Planet HB22147-C, Gaza Strip  
Stardate 2260.52.6

- 1545 hours -

Stunned Reavers lay piled on top of each other in a massive arrangement around the mosque. Those that hadn't been stunned by phasers were now stunned with fear and kept their distance, with most of them wandering off looking for easier prey or fleeing in fear of their lives. A handful squatted amongst their fallen comrades, apparently in mourning, until Starfleet officers stunned them as well, just in case they decided to seek revenge.

Finally, only the children remained. The medical teams beamed down behind the mosque where they wouldn't spook anyone and setup a triage center using the children's own tents. Doctor McCoy counted twenty five altogether, out of a group that originally contained forty to fifty. He moved through them like a mechanic on a factory floor, mentally cataloguing injuries to send his priority list back to the ship. Once the translators zeroed in on their dialect - no easy task considering how hysterically most of them were crying - he was able to gather that this fight had been some kind of last stand, that the Reavers had been slowly boxing them in wolfpack-style for weeks, systematically separating and eliminating all the older males while disposing of the younger ones much less carefully. Apparently all of these children had once been classmates at a local elementary school, a class that once consisted of two hundred boys and girls.

Which was hardly the _most_ confusing thing McCoy had learned today.

"Leila! Nabi!" someone ten miles tall and radiating enough dominant energy to power a starbase was shouting across the room from one of the suspension tents. McCoy turned his attention that way and saw one of the children - a teenaged girl, the oldest of the group by far - standing next to the tent waving two of her younger comrades over to join her. By the thick cloak she was wearing and the SKS rifle slung on her shoulder he identified her as one of the sharpshooters the fire teams had noticed; the going theory right now was that she was the closest thing this group of ragtags had to a leader.

The children she'd called looked eight to ten years old. They were obviously siblings, in fact they might have been twins. "You two, get together anyone who isn't injured, collect all the hardware you can in this tent."

"Weapons and ammunition...?" asked the boy.

"Leave that for later. We need the engine stuff. Petrol, batteries, alternators, that sort of thing."

"Yes Admiral!" both of the children saluted, then sped off with such speed and purpose that would have put half of Starfleet to shame.

Meanwhile, the older girl squatted back down in her tent and went back some delicate maintenance task she'd been engrossed in until now. Her fingers had an almost surgical precision; if McCoy didn't know better, he'd swear she was a trained engineer. "What are you doing?" he asked, walking towards her with all appropriate respect for what was, after all, the closest thing this planet still had to a local authority figure.

"I'm trying to fix this computer," she said, not even looking up from the jumbled assortment of electronic components at her feet. Whatever sort of "computer" it might have been, it was really little more than a stack of circuit boards held in position with electrical tape and pieces of plywood.

McCoy didn't know if she was serious or just playing a game. "If you need a computer, I can provide one for you."

"This one has files we don't want to lose."

"Like what?"

"Pictures, video..." she thought for a long moment, a _very_ long moment, swept up in a sudden flood of memories, "Our parents, our friends, basically a record of everything that's happened to us until now. I know, it's silly, but we felt like it was important to document everything in case we didn't survive." The two kids she'd called over earlier returned now with a half dozen others, all carrying armfuls of machine parts and bottles of petrol fuel. These they carefully deposited in the tent around her and went off through the mosque, looking for anything else that might be salvageable. "It was tricky to keep the cell phones working," she added, "Most of the batteries are no good anymore, but some of them still work. As soon as we could charge one, we took videos of everything we could, we recorded some journals and updates and downloaded it all to this computer."

That prompted another look at this crudely-assembled device. Gathering clues from scattered and confused reports was one thing, but here was a group of people who had intentionally gathered from their own environment all the information relevant to the fate of this planet and whatever it was that caused the cataclysm here. Lieutenant York would have an orgasm when he heard about this.

Carefully, delicately, the girl peeled up a layer of electrical tape and removed a long flat rectangular component, similar enough to one of York's artifacts that McCoy immediately recognized it as a computer hard drive. "I'm sure you have machining equipment on your ship. I can finish it when we get there, but I don't want to loose these files."

"How do you know we came from a ship?"

"I saw your..." she pointed at the ceiling and the sky beyond it, "helicopter... airplane... _things_... flying around up there. I haven't seen any tanks or ground vehicles, so you must have come from an aircraft carrier or something."

"Something like that," he snapped open his tricorder and started the first of a series of bioscans with the scanner probe. As much as this girl seemed to be in control of the situation, he wasn't about to let her get away without a physical.

She seemed to sense that some kind of examination was underway, though she didn't have a clue how or why. Nor did she seem to care; for her, indeed everyone here, Starfleet technology seemed equivalent to magic, but even to these children, it was undeniably _technology_. "Are you a doctor?" she asked, then seemed to kick herself for asking such a dumb question.

"Yes. Are you a general?"

She smiled. "No, I'm an admiral."

"You don't look old enough to be an admiral."

"I'm the oldest, and I'm the only one who knows how to run the fishing boat, so that makes me the admiral."

"You have a fishing boat? We didn't see anything on the way in."

"Ah... the monsters wrecked our boat when we put in a week ago. They've been chasing us ever since. Are you sure you didn't see us? We launch flares every time we go out to sea... you _are_ with the U.N. aren't you?"

"Something like that," he said again. Hopefully her curiosity would abate until someone a little more tactful arrived to explain the situation to her.

No such luck, though. "Where are you from?" She looked at his uniform and his equipment and then asked, "European? American? I don't recognize your accent but it sounds kinda British."

"Accent? Oh..." it was easy to forget that what she heard and what he heard were two completely different things. The Linguicode Translator worked in the background of every conversation, converting Arabic to English and back again, but there were always some nuances of speech and pronunciation that the mechanical device couldn't fully process. In her ears, he was speaking Arabic; apparently, it sounded to her like Arabic with a slight British accent. "We're from the uh... the _new_ U.N. It's a lot bigger than the old one."

"Oh..." she glared at him now, manifesting impatience. "Are you finished yet?"

"I'm just getting started. First of all, what's your name?"

"Miriam Hallab. My friends call me Miri."

"How old are you, Miri?"

She turned and faced him finally, resigning herself to the fact that it was apparently time to give an interview with the people who had just shown up to save her. "Sixteen. I think."

"You think?"

"It's been a long time since I saw a calendar. What _year_ is it?"

McCoy scratched his head. "You know something, that's a very good question. How long ago did this..." he gestures around, "all of this... when did it happen? It looks like it's been _ages_."

"Yeah, the world has _gone crazy_. The grownups said it was the end of the world. When I saw your tasers I thought you were angels..." Miri looked around the square surrounding the mosque, at the crumbling ruins beyond, at the twisted bodies of unconscious Reavers in the distance all around. She shuddered, "I don't know why, but everything is decaying at super speed. Only a few years ago this was all new construction. And it's no coincidence, that's when everyone started to change into monsters too."

"This all started _a few years_ ago?"

Miri nodded. Then she thought about the question and added, "Well... _started_, no. It's been going on for a _long_ time. But it didn't get this bad until two about two summers ago."

"Why? What happened then?"

"Everyone started changing at once. See, the year before that, twenty or thirty people would change in a week, the gangs would take them out and shoot them before they got dangerous. Then it was fifty, then a hundred, then two hundred... and then that summer, like a thousand people all changed at once, then everything went straight to hell. Last year, even some of the _kids_ started to change... that had never happened before, it used to only happens to adults."

"How long have these changes been going on for?"

"I don't know. I first heard about it when I was very young. Seven, I think. I remember my mother saying it was God's punishment to the Jews. A few months later _she_ started to change and the soldiers came and shot her."

"You were seven?"

She thought for a moment, "Maybe older. I just remember my mother changed after I turned seven. Then little by little, everyone else started changing. Some of the religious groups tried to pull things together a few years ago, but it didn't last. There were gangs, bandits, some crazy Jordanians were driving around in a tank they stole somewhere... but sooner or later, all of them changed. Us here..." she gestured around the room, "we all stuck together since we were in the same school and we figured out that only the adults go through the change. And now it seems like we're the only ones _left_."

McCoy patted her on the shoulder. He watched her shrinking down little by little, years of desperation and white-knuckled clinging to life pouring out of her feet. She was becoming a civilian again, making the transition from fighter to refugee that would never completely end. "You survived by yourself all this time?"

"There were some soldiers with us at some point," she looked at her feet, "Two guys from the security forces and a couple of freedom fighters. We even had some Israelis come and join us when their cities started to collapse."

"Social order broke down..."

"No, I mean _literally_ _collapsed_. Every new building in Haifa just _disintegrated_. That happened here too, but most of our buildings are alot older. But the Israeli survivors, they all started to change too. They stopped talking, they stopped wearing clothes... they acted like... well, apes or something, except they got all fat and lazy and refused to do anything but growl at each other. The ones that didn't change, they got killed off by the monsters a few at a time. Those monsters rape the men they capture. It's how they breed."

McCoy shuddered. "We've noticed."

"We had this guy, Private Gideon... he taught me how to shoot, and how to hide, and how to dig trenches and make tents. And my father taught me how to use the fishing boat since the navy ships weren't blockading anymore. So when everyone else changed, Gideon and I got as many of the kids as I could and we got on those last two boats and went out looking for food and fuel. Poor Gideon... when he started to change into an ape-man he became really stupid and lazy. That's when the monsters got him."

McCoy grabbed her by the arm and lead her to a corner of the room, offered her a folding chair Doctor Ayash had set up for occasions like this. He'd warned the entire medical team, but McCoy had special interest in her most of all. If the other children really looked up to her as a leader, then she would be at the top of the triage list if they were ever going to save them.

The scanner was setup next to the chair, a smaller version of the device that had done the photosection of the reaver. In this case, Ayash programmed it to make a microcellular scan for specific markers, so as soon as Doctor McCoy turned it on the results were beamed to his tricorder in a matter of seconds. "Damn."

Miri looked at him in alarm. "Did you forget something?"

McCoy sighed. "I need to take you back to our ship. We need to treat you, and soon."

She looked him in the eye for a moment or so, then asked almost in a whisper, "Am I changing?"

He nodded.

"How long do I have?"

"A hundred years, if I have anything to do with it. But you need to come with me right now."

"What about the others?"

McCoy smiled, "We won't leave anyone behind. Once they're well enough, they'll come too. And by the way, you can leave your weapons behind this time, you won't be needing them after this."

"That's good to hear... hey, Doctor, you didn't tell me your name. I told you mine. That's rude, y'know."

"My name is Doctor Leonard McCoy. My friends call me Bones."

Miri grinned. "I used to have a dog named Bones."

"Arf." McCoy offered a hand, and Miri stood and followed him around behind the Mosque. Near the back entrance he passed Spock, hard at work with a tricorder and flux beam trying to make heads or tails of the erratic quantum date readings he was getting from the structure around them. "How goes it?"

Spock looked at his tricorder for a long moment, a look of consternation and angst growing on his face. Then he looked at Miri, then at McCoy, and said simply, "Do you think it would be possible to transport all of these survivors within the next five minutes?"

McCoy startled, "Five minutes? Well... sure, it's possible, but..."

"Five minutes, Doctor. _Less_ if possible. I have reason to believe our sensor devices may be inherently disruptive to this planet's stability."

"Disruptive of... you mean the aging thing?" He'd seen enough to get a good idea of their injuries. Most of them had bumps and bruises and contusions, the worst had broken bones or pains in strange places that left concerns about internal injuries that might be aggravated by a transporter beam. "Alright, I'll take the first five right now. Some will have to be transported in stasis fields, though."

"Very well, Doctor, just as long as they are taken off this planet as soon as possible."

"Is it _that_ critical, Spock?"

"Probably not. But to quote an old Human proverb, 'Better safe than sorry.'"

"I guess." McCoy turned Miri back the way they came and marched back into the triage center, shouting as he went, "Listen up! I want the first five in the lowest priority ready for transport in thirty seconds! We're clearing out, _right now_..." he was almost knocked off his feet as Lieutenant Sulu rushed past him, sort of stumbling/shuffling towards the back entrance where Spock was still analyzing the structures and hating every minute of it. "Easy there, sailor."

"Sorry, Doctor... Mister Spock!"

Spock somehow acknowledged his presence without looking away from his screens.

"Sir," Sulu said, running up to him panting, "I have to report, Sir..."

"You were absent from the defensive action, Mister Sulu, I therefore expect your report to be either extremely interesting or insulting to my intelligence."

Sulu took a moment to translate the hidden meaning, then said, "I won't make any excuses, Sir. I got... well, distracted."

"Doing what"

"I ran into a scout from the Gorn ship, Sir. We were both stuck in a bad position and couldn't get out of it until the Reavers passed. Had a good talk, though..."

Spock looked up at Sulu wide eyed, "You spoke with it?"

"Yes Sir."

A few moments passed, and when Sulu didn't continue Spock asked, "_And_?"

"They're not interested in us, at least not primarily. Said his ship is called 'Francium.' As far as I can tell, it's a military fishing vessel. They're here to collect specimens for a dinner order."

Spock raised a brow.

"His exact words, Sir. It didn't make much sense to me either... um... I gather that their nutritional needs favor invertebrates, so I guess they're here, sort of, foraging, or something. Either way, he gave me the impression their ship is one of the front line vessels of their fleet. I told him that Enterprise was on a peaceful mission and we weren't looking to fight anyone, he said they were the same way."

"Fascinating." Spock thought this over for a long moment, almost blissfully satisfied with the knowledge, "What do they know about this planet?"

"The translator might have malfunctioned, Sir... but according to the scout, the planet was inhabited by a thriving civilization only three years ago. When they came back a year later, the place was in ruins. If the timing is right, then the cataclysm must have happened just a couple of weeks after Constellation's survey."

"Then they already know what _we_ have just discovered, Lieutenant... what else have you determined?"

Sulu shrugged, "Apart from that, nothing. He gave every indication that they're not interested in _us_ at all. They're only here for the food, Sir. There are certain invertebrate species they consider to be delicacies that they can't find on any other planet."

Spock nodded. "I'll expect a full report when you return to the Enterprise, Lieutenant... where is the Gorn now?"

"He took off as soon as the coast was clear. He seemed nervous."

"Understandable, given the circumstances..." the room crackled with light, and Doctor McCoy along with a small collection of children vanished into the swirling lights of transporter beams. "Lieutenant, spread the word to all away teams to break camp and return to the ship immediately. We may be in danger if we remain any longer."

Sulu nodded and moved off to the triage center's command post to circulate the order.


	8. Chapter 8

**Doppelgänger**

USS Enterprise (NCC-1701)  
Doppelgänger Orbit  
Stardate 2261.1.1

- 0820 hours -

Ensign Rand had a pretty good idea what to expect when she got the security call from sickbay. There weren't, after all, that many things that could go wrong in a sickbay that might require the presence of security officers, and most of those had to do with guests and civilians. Enterprise's only guests, as Rand confirmed on entering the room, was a gaggle of extremely anxious toddlers and pre-teens, crowded around the glass divider between the infirmary section and the surgery suite. Some were sitting in a circle muttering half-remembered prayers, three were penciling good-luck symbols on voodoo dolls, and two were actually presiding over the entire group with stern, authoritarian expressions with AKM rifles slung from their shoulders. It was probably the two armed children that prompted the call for security, not that they were making any threatening actions when Rand walked in. Maybe just the idea of a couple of twelve year olds with machineguns was enough to make the medical staff more than a little nervous; she couldn't really blame them.

Nor could she blame the children either. After all, the closest thing they had to a parent had been in surgery for the last two hours, and that would have been stressful enough even under normal circumstances.

"Miss Rand, good to see you," Doctor Ayash flagged her over as soon as she came in. The children had largely congealed around him like bees around a bowl of honey, seeking any sort of medical reassurance he could give them that their beloved Admiral would be with them again soon. "I was just explaining to our little guests here how poor Miri is going to be up and about very soon."

Rand nodded at the other two security officers, and they both took positions on opposite sides of sickbay, far enough away that they didn't seem to be a threat but close enough that a wide-field phaser stun could immobilize everyone in the room if something went wrong. Rand moved through the middle of the group and remembered that old introduction her gymnastics teacher used to use when she was little, "Good morning, friends! What seems to be the trouble?"

The two kids with the guns - a boy and a girl who looked like they might have been twins - answered dutifully, "Admiral Miri is in surgery, Ma'am," said the boy, "We're here to guard her until she's fully recovered."

Rand could relate. It hadn't been that long since she'd dropped out of college to enlist in Starfleet; she was still young enough to remember what it was like to be a child. "You don't need to guard her from us, do you? I thought we were friends?"

The girl shook her head, "Not from you, but what if the ship gets attacked by aliens?"

Rand smiled, "As I'm sure the Admiral would tell you, since you're on _our_ ship now, defending it is our responsibility and you are our guests. If we were on your fishing boat, you wouldn't want us walking around with our guns all the time, would you?"

"I guess not," the twins exchanged long, confirmatory glances. Then both pointed their rifles at the ceiling, detached the ammunition magazines and cleared the round from the chamber, a set of movements so precise and so well practiced that Rand realized they probably knew those weapons better than she knew her phaser.

"My name's Janice," she said, collecting their ammunition but - respectfully - not their weapons, "Can you tell me your names?"

"Leila," said the boy, pointing to his sister.

"Nabi," said the girl, pointing to her brother.

And suddenly there was a ripple of responses from all around them, voices on top of voices all saying at once:

"Gabriel!"

"Sami."

"My name's Karr."

"Your name's _not_ Karr!"

"Sahib."

"I'm Jasmine."

"No you're not! _I'm_ Jasmine!"

"I'm Ramsi."

"Moshe."

"Peter the Rabbit."

"That's such a stupid name!"

"Peter the Rabbit is a _wise_ name!"

"My name's Forest Gump! People call me Forest Gump!"

"Hold on, now, one at a time," Rand held up her hands, but the kids went straight from barking their names to arguing about what their names actually were. Half of them, evidently, went by pseudonyms that the other half didn't like.

Leila and Nabi silenced it all with a single loud military-style yelp, so fast and so curt that the translator didn't really pick it up. It might have been an obscenity, or maybe just a sharp phoneme the others were trained to follow; either way, the entire room became totally silent, and Leila turned their attention towards something more constructive. "Doctor Ayash says Miri has cancers."

Rand looked at Ayash. The older Doctor nodded, "Doctor McCoy is doing an operation to remove them now. He's very good, you know."

"But what if she bleeds out?" Nabi asked, "Like in TV shows, when they do a operation, sometimes the operation people die."

Ayash stepped back a few paces and pulled a medical kit off the table behind him. He carefully selected several surgical tools and a medical tricorder, and then gestured for Nabi to walk towards him. "I'll show you how easy it is, okay? All of you gather around, you'll want to see this."

The promise of a demonstration was too tempting to resist. In seconds all twenty five children had formed a tight formation around the doctor, and Nabi and Leila were standing in front of him with nervous but excited expressions. "First we use this," Ayash opened the tricorer and took out the scanning head, "It's a little gadget that can see inside you. We can use it to see what's wrong. And you, little Nabi..." Ayash ran the scanning head next to the boy's chin, "Does your tooth hurt?"

Leila answered for him, "He has a bad tooth. It's really painful. Sometimes he wakes me up at night crying like a bit fat baby, always 'aww, aww,'"

Nabi, for his part, just nodded.

"Want me to fix it?"

Nabi shook his head and clenched his jaw shut.

"It won't hurt at all. In fact, it might even tickle."

Nabi grinned, the reluctantly opened his mouth.

Ayash took another scan, then turned the tricorder around so the kids could see, "The machine tells me that Nabi's left bottom molar is dead and it's gotten a little infected. So we're going to do a little operation to fix it."

"An operation?" Nabi looked mortified.

"Yes. Right here."

"Here?"

"Right here. Right now." Ayash took out two surgical tools. Each of them could be mistaken for a simple fountain pen any other day, but Ayash demonstrated the first by using it against the second. "First I'm going to grab it with these forceps here, like this," he aimed the tip of one "pen" at the handle of the second and pushed a button. A faint blue beam sparkled between them, and when Ayash moved his hand, the second tool moved with it, gripped in the air by the implacable force of a short-range tractor beam. "Then I'll take this other tool," he dropped the second pen into his open hand, "And I'll make the tooth wiggly so we can just take it right out. It'll be just like when you were little and you used to get loose teeth."

That didn't seem all that scary. Nabi relaxed, though even he didn't understand how this was supposed to work.

Ayash put both tools down on the table, then before Nabi could ask the question, loaded a hypospray and shot a quick injection into his jaw. Nabi flinched, but before he could even complain Ayash put his hand on the top of the boy's head and aimed the forceps right at the side of his jaw. "Open wide, now."

Nabi opened, and looking straight into his mouth, Ayash adjusted the beam depth until the end of the tractor beam passed through the skin, held it steady until it was poised directly over the offending tooth. Then he locked the beam in place with another button and let it go; the tractor beam held in place, and the forceps hovered in the air, attached to Nabi's jaw by its invisible graviton beam.

"Whoa!" Leila's was the first reaction, followed by amazed gasps and "oohs" and "ahhs" from the kids. It had all the dynamics of a magic trick so far, except for Nabi, who could only get the sense that something really improbable had just happened to the forceps but couldn't tell what.

Ayash took the second "pen" and adjusted it the same way, first toying with the beam depth so the guide beam would pass through the side of the boy's jaw until it was at just the right spot on the offending tooth. When he pressed the second button, the beam passed harmlessly through the side of his cheek and began to slowly ablate the tissues around the tooth, literally vaporizing part of the gum and the root of the infected molar. The widest part of the beam could scoop and cauterize the entire root in a milisecond, much faster than the reaction time of his pain receptors, and once his work was done, Ramsi gently lifted the forceps, moved the now-extracted tooth out of Nabi's open mouth and held it in the air for all to see. "How was that, huh?"

"You mean you just to-" Nabi patted his jaw then suddenly smiled, "My tooth doesn't hurt anymore!"

The rest of the children were equally impressed: "That's cool!"

"I wanna be a doctor when I grow up."

"It's, like, magic!"

"One time, I went to a dentist, and he used a big metal drill with a big-"

"My tooth hurts too!"

"Mine too!"

"Me next!"

"Can you put fangs in my mouth?"

"I want a _gold_ tooth!"

"Excuse me, friends!" Rand shouted from the back of the rapidly-exploding formation, "We can't _all_ get operations! Remember, Miri still has to get her tumors taken out, and that will take some time."

Leila asked, "She'll be okay, won't she?"

"Of course she will," Nabi answered, "It's just like taking out my tooth."

"Right. Now," Rand gestured for them all to stand; half of them did, the other half stood only on seeing their peers stand up. "While we're waiting, how about we head down to the cafeteria and get some ice cream? Anyone want ice cream?"

To Rand's surprise, no one showed much excitement about the idea. Which was briefly confusing, until it occurred to her that most of these kids had grown up in the decay and desperation of a dying planet, and the only ones old enough to remember the pre-calamity times were already living in a war zone. Less than a handful of them had any idea what ice cream _was_. "Come on, friends," Rand started for the door, "Today is your lucky day."

Leila and Nabi shrugged, and followed her out of sickbay. The others followed Leila and Nabi, and in about half a minute the sickbay was empty of anyone but medical staff and a handful of Starfleet patients.

Ayash breathed a sigh of relief, then tapped the intercom button for the surgical suite as he stared through the glass, "How's the patient, Leonard?"

McCoy - who was, at the moment, beaming a walnut-sized tumor out of Miri's chest with a microtransporter - said without looking up, "Separated from the planet, this all becomes ordinary cancer tissue, and alot of it's gotten into her lungs. It's gonna take more microtrans work than usual."

Ayash looked at the patient, sleeping a dreamless sleep under the gentle coaxing of neural calipers on the operating table. She would never truly know how close she came to degenerating into one of the half-mad abominations she'd been fleeing all her life; even Doctor McCoy didn't care to contemplate it. "How much time do you need?"

McCoy shrugged, "Should have it in another four hours. Why don't you have the kids come back after dinner. She'll be up by then."

.

- 1859 hours -

Captain Kirk arrived in the conference room exactly five seconds before 1900 hours. He hadn't exactly planned it this way, he had simply underestimated the speed of the turbolift and overestimated the walking distance from the lift station to the conference room, two mistakes that cancelled out magically. Spock, of course, was able to deduce this by the Captain's body language and stride, and it mystified him to the point that he almost greeted him with hostility, "Captain. It is agreeable to see you again." And Spock inwardly wondered about human superstitions and what kind of strange mystical force compelled Kirk to always be at exactly the right place at exactly the right time.

"Yeah, I missed you too, Spock. And happy new year." He took a seat next to the computer console - Spock's reserved station - and searched the faces of the assembled staff. Doctor Marcus was opposite both of them, with the balance of the table occupied by Doctor McCoy, Lieutenant York, Lieutenant Sulu, Ensign Chekov, Lieutenant Bailey, Commander Scott and Lieutenant Uhura. "So what have you found?"

Spock summarized his results as succinctly as he could manage, the relevant information already on the conference room screen. "We have now determined the total age of the planet we have come to call Doppelgänger to be approximately one hundred and sixty five Earth years. The remnant of the humanoid civilization we have encountered came into existence between five and ten years ago, only to be ravaged by a cataclysm that caused widespread mutation and political upheaval approximately eighteen months ago, culminating in the events of today. Current readings indicate the planet will be uninhabitable within six months, totally inert within a year."

Kirk stared at Spock in something like awe, but more subdued than that. It was the face of a man who had just been told his car wouldn't start because of a tribble stuck in the fuel line. "What is your support for that conclusion?"

"Anomalous radiometric and quantum dating results required more detailed analysis of the age of structures and organisms. We determined that certain materials - particularly stones, metals and minerals -showed disproportionate age readings compared to others. Isolating samples from the planet's environment yields still more discrepancies, however a cross-sectional analysis between two clusters of samples, one isolated and the other not, indicates a pattern of chronological disparity. In summation, Captain, this planet is subject to extreme rapid aging."

"We saw this in the cell structure of the reavers," McCoy added, "During mitosis the cells begin to divide normally, but their DNA structures immediately become viral. They form unstable tissues that resemble cancer cells, grown too fast to sustain themselves, so they have to metastasize into surrounding tissues just to keep from disintegrating."

"Similar effects were observed by the inhabitants themselves," said Spock, gesturing to Lieutenant York's report on the monitor, "Our most useful information comes from archival information, amateur videos and news sources compiled by the group of survivors who call themselves 'the Onlies.' This, combined with peripheral information culled from our own field work, captured the rapid disintegration of modern buildings as their supporting structures began to decay at an unbelievable rate. Several independent sources recorded the collapse of the Sears Tower as its load-bearing structure succumbed to rapid oxidation."

"You're saying its _things_ that are accelerated?" Kirk said, "It's not time dilation or any similar phenomenon?"

Spock nodded, "Quantum dating and radiometric dating both depend on the regularity of certain natural processes, either quantum oscillation of g-mesons, or the decay of radioactive elements such as carbon-14. In both cases, the rates of oscillation and decay are accelerated only in _surface_ samples. Most core samples and deep strata specimens remain unaffected."

Kirk nodded slowly, taking this in and accepting it as fact. If Spock had discovered it, no matter how strange it sounded, he knew better than to doubt him. "What could have caused that?"

"Our two competing theories, composed by Doctor Marcus and myself, both assume that that this is a consequence of the technique used in the planet's creation. _I_ believe that this may have been intended by the designers, and that this planet may have been designed to live a short life before destroying itself. For what purpose, I cannot say."

"And Doctor Marcus' theory?" Kirk looked at her coldly, almost as a challenge. Did she have something better than Spock, or was this just a token effort by the resident civilian?

"My theory," Marcus said, "is that these conditions may have resulted from unplanned alien influence. In particular, that Gorn ship in orbit."

"You think the _Gorn_ are responsible for everything that's happening down there?" asked Lieutenant Bailey.

Doctor Marcus shrugged, "Not directly. But based on the information we've collected, the irregularities are most widespread on the North American west coast, close to the Gorn's present fishing grounds. They either did something to the planet that destabilized it, or their very presence is somehow disruptive."

"Doctor Marcus' theory does have merit, Captain," Spock added, "Sensor readings of the Gaza Strip area indicate severe seismic and radioactive anomalies following the departure of our shuttlecraft. The region's atomic clock may have somehow been disrupted by the subspace emissions from our drive systems, in which case even our presence in orbit may be contributing to greater instability."

"Yes, that's an interesting theory, but it doesn't really explain what the hell is wrong with this planet, does it?" Kirk leaned forward, "We've orbited planets before without warping their... atomic clocks, as you put it. Why would it be happening _here_?"

Spock frowned, "At the risk of stating the obvious, I would say it is because this planet is artificial, and may not be fully formed yet. If it was created through a phased-matter manipulation process similar to our transporters, on a scale this large the planet itself may yet to have completely materialized even a hundred and sixty years after its formation. As with, for example, concrete: it takes a certain amount of time to 'cure.'"

"And the larger the structure," Scotty said, "the longer it takes to cure."

"Precisely. Beaming people or objects, the analogous 'curing' requires a handful of seconds. A planet this size may still be in flux even now."

"So, okay," Kirk rubbed his temples, "The planet is becoming unstable, parts of it are aging too quickly... this explains the mutations?"

"Parts of their cells are aging at accelerated rates, yes. The discrepancy is only a matter of milliseconds, but it is enough to cause mutations and aberrant behaviors. In other cases - those of buildings and artificial structures - the acceleration is more marked. For another example, several days ago we identified an American naval vessel - the USS John McCain - sitting abandoned in its dry dock in San Diego." Spock put an image of that vessel on the viewscreen, showing an orbital image of a rusted but otherwise intact vessel sitting half-collapsed on a giant concrete platform near the shore. "This is the same vessel an hour ago," and this time, the ship was gone; in its place was a pile of reddish soil hundreds of feet high, the results of an iron hull completely decomposed into rust, a process that should otherwise have taken hundreds of years. "Curiously, this phenomenon is not entirely consistent. The USS John C. Stennis, docked only a quarter mile away, remains in relatively good condition, despite being infested with reavers and some of their male counterparts."

"Radiometric data from the rocky mountains," Doctor Marcus added, "Shows a timeslip of almost five thousand years, while the Swiss Alps show almost no timeslip at all. And based on deep strata samples we beamed aboard, the planet's mantle is at least thirty million years older than the crust."

Kirk looked around the table, wondering if this was about to become the Spock and Carol show. "Mister Sulu."

"Sir?"

"Your friend, the Runner. What was his take on all of this?"

"He seemed troubled by the changes the planet was going through. They're not exploring it like we are, but they're definitely curious."

Kirk nodded, then turned to his communications officer, "How about news sources? What did the _locals_ know about all this?"

"The Onlies did a pretty good job of compiling the records, considering their limited resources. The first mention of the mutations seems to coincide with the arrival of a Gorn ship some time in the year 1998, first as conventional but extremely unusual cancer cases, but as these cases increased it lead to the first reports of the Reaver phenomenon in 2000. But even as early as 1996, there are some confused reports of age anomalies, structures weakening in days that are supposed to last for years, reports of airplanes fresh off the assembly line collapsing from metal fatigue..."

"The age distortion is along a pattern of geologic time," Spock added, "the more recently something formed, the less susceptible it is to age distortion. It remains a possibility that the creation of this planet one hundred sixty five years ago was of a ground-up approach, accelerated by degrees in order of which structures took the longest to form. Complex life took less time and was therefore subject to less acceleration. Humanoid life, less time still, same again for intelligence, technology, social structure..."

"But that doesn't explain the mutations," Marcus said, "If this was all according to design, _something_ must have gone wrong."

Spock folded his arms, "This type of rapid development method does not take into account the presence of necessary developmental dead ends, processes and structures that develop slowly, but at a specific time have a large effect on other processes. Many human characteristics, for example, develop slowly over a period of years and undergo final development abruptly at the onset of puberty. To reverse this process - with rapid development of body features followed by extremely slow maturation - evidently results in the extreme distortion of the genotype, resulting in physical deformities and behavioral abnormalities. Now, having said that," Spock lowered his head, "Logically, I must concede the fact that some triggering factor _must_ be responsible even for this."

Kirk stiffened, "Why?"

"It seems evident that the mutagenic cataclysm occurred at a pivotal moment, possibly when the planet neared the completion of its intended form. Something interrupted that completion, and the entire planet began to mutate. The Gorn may have introduced a contaminant, or some other factor we are not aware of."

"So _your_ theory," Kirk said, "is that this planet was created - somehow - a hundred and sixty five years ago. That furthermore, this planet was supposed to become what it was meant to become three years ago, but something interfered. Am I getting all that, Mister Spock?"

"In summation, Captain, yes."

Chekov added, "But isn't it possible the planet _did_ achieve its final form? Think about this: perhaps the planet was only programmed to have a normal evolution up to a certain point, and beyond that point the program terminates and what we're seeing now is the leftovers?"

"Completed, neglected, and fallen into disrepair..." Spock nodded, "That, _also_, is a possibility."

Kirk said, "But it still leaves us with three basic questions: who created this planet, why did they do it, and _how_ did they do it."

Spock sat up a little, "We are somewhat closer to the _how_, Captain. Circumstantial evidence suggests massive application of some type of quantum replication technology or similar transporter device on a massive scale..."

"That's still circumstantial. I want something solid. The Federation Council wants to know _why_, Starfleet wants to know _who_, and the science ministry wants to know _how_..." Kirk shot a glance at Doctor Marcus, "and I suspect they already have in mind who they want to replicate the process once _how_ becomes known."

"Or develop their own, inspired by it. And I don't mind telling you, Captain, this entire mission has been pretty damned inspiring."

Doctor McCoy said, "Jim, I've been talking with those kids we beamed up from the surface. Most of them were born after the mutations started, but the two oldest mentioned some things that made my hair stand up. They say that a few years ago there were rumors about an alien invasion in Japan..."

"Speaking of which, Doctor," Kirk asked, "How are they holding up? I'm told a few were injured on the planet."

"They all checked out. Especially Miri, the oldest. I had to remove about five kilograms of tumors, but she'll make a full recovery in a day or so," McCoy turned to Spock, "if we'd gotten to her a few hours later, she'd be eating carrion off the streets by now. Whatever's happening to these people, the effect only lasts as long as they're near the planet."

Kirk nodded. "Sorry to interrupt, go ahead."

"Well," McCoy went on, "I had Scotty and Uhura check the media archives we pulled from Miri's hard drive..." he glanced at Uhura.

"They confirm a slew of UFO sightings in the Pacific region not long before the mutation period," Uhura finished.

"They must have spotted the Gorn," Doctor Marcus said.

"That's what _I_ thought at first, but the most detailed reports describe, and I quote," Uhura pulled up a note file on his palmcomp and red it aloud, "'The total eclipse of the sun by an unknown object other than the moon.'"

"_That's_ a little unsettling..."

Uhura went on, "Yeah, but then I had York compare press releases between real Earth and this Earth. They're identical until the time of that incident, and until the mutations start to manifest there are only three one major discrepancies. Firstly, the entire satellite communications network became totally inoperable, all GPS and communications satellites ceased to function in an instant. It was believed to be related to the eclipse event. But that issue slipped into the background with the second discrepancy: an almost global panic at a certain point when ground observers suddenly noticed the presence of the second moon."

Kirk raised a brow, "Doppelgänger has _two_ moons..."

"Right, but remember that other report mentions _the_ moon. Meaning that prior to that point, the people on this world believed they had a _single_ moon. They didn't seem to notice the second until after that anomalous eclipse event, and after that they observed that both moons were significantly different from the one they..." Uhura hesitated on this point, "The one they _landed_ on in the 60s."

"_Did_ they land on the moon?" Sulu asked, "Constellation's report emphasizes that there were no spacecraft or satellites in orbit of the planet..."

"They seem to _remember_ that they did, but it's unlikely it really happened."

Spock added, "I suspect a certain amount of development time would be required, even if this planet was created instantly in its completed form. The inhabitants were probably programmed with the memories and experiences of real humans of the early twenty first century. The current group of survivors shares no memories in common with any real person, they were all born during or after the onset of decay, yet are not themselves immune to it."

"That's _very_ unsettling," Kirk said, "Replicating a planet is one thing, but replicating an entire society right down to individual memories..."

"Captain," Uhura interrupted, "The third major discrepancy before the mutations comes from an activist group called the Sea Shephards Conservation Society, a group of volunteers opposed to illegal whaling in the Southern Oceans. Those reports indicated the complete disappearance of Humpback whales after that species seemed to be recovering, followed shortly by the disappearance of the entire Minke species."

"How is that significant?" Marcus asked.

"Earth records show the Humpback was hunted to extinction in the 2040s after anti-whaling laws became un-enforceable, and the Minke was never threatened with extinction in the first place. Timeslip aside, this planet is in the equivalent year of about 2009, so they shouldn't _be_ extinct yet. But three days of sensor passes and oceanic probes, there's no sign of the Humpbacks or the Minkes anywhere on the planet."

Commander Scott smiled. Then he faintly laughed.

"Mister Scott?" Spock looked at him sideways.

"Our first candidate for 'why' Mister Spock," Scott said with a grin, "This planet was created because someone in this wide galaxy wanted some whales."

Marcus snorted, "With that kind of technology, they could have just _replicated_ them."

"Yeah. That's exactly what they _did_." McCoy's eyes twinkled, "Think about it, Spock. We can clone tissues in a laboratory, we can even stimulate them to grow faster, but you still have to _incubate_ those tissues somewhere, and the best incubators always mimic that tissue's natural environment. And if you were to clone an entire species - even if you meant to transplant them elsewhere - wouldn't you want to do it on a planet that most closely resembled its native environment?"

"Especially if one intended to breed clones with natural specimens," Spock nodded, "A very distinct possibility, Doctor."

Kirk turned his chair towards Doctor Marcus, "Okay. That's weird, but it's a possible _why_. Now are we prepared to speculate as to _whom_?"

Lieutenant Bailey shrugged, "There are no known aquatic life forms with this kind of technology. The only ones who even come close are the Xindi Aquatics and the Tiburon Covenant and neither of them have the industrial capacity for anything this big."

Sulu asked, "Why an _aquatic_ life form? If they're transplanting whales, they might be cultivating them for food just like the Gorn."

"For that matter," Chekov said, "Maybe the _Gorn_ have created it?"

"We don't know enough about the Gorn, but that's unlikely given what little we know of their technology. As for sustenance... it is possible. If the development period is analogous to germination, then the whales may have been harvested at a time when the planet had sufficiently ripened to remove them from it."

"But apart from the Minkes, they didn't take any _other_ cetacean species," Uhura said, "I checked with the oceanic probes. As best we can tell, they're all accounted for at roughly 2009 numbers..."

Bailey leaned forward, "Captain, can I make a suggestion?"

"By all means, Mister Bailey."

"All this speculation is getting us nowhere. We need solid information from a direct source."

Kirk looked slightly annoyed. "We know that, Mister Bailey. Unfortunately, Mister Spock won't know how to travel though time for another hundred and twenty eight years, so direct observation is out of the question."

Emotional control on the brink, Spock _almost_ rolled his eyes.

"Yes, Sir, I understand... but I think there might be a way."

Kirk tilted his head invitingly, "You have a suggestion, I'm all ears."

"One hundred sixty five years, right Mister Spock?"

"Approximately sixty thousand four hundred and thirty eight days, Lieutenant."

Bailey pretended to understand how or why that was relevant and went on, "From a far enough distance, we could view the creation through a telescope."

Sulu said, "We don't know the exact date of the planet's creation. It would take us weeks of warping back and forth between observation points to figure out the exact moment of creation. Plus, we'd have no way to monitor the progress of the planet..."

"We could arrange for another starship to take remote readings from that distance. Get a before and after shot of what the system looked like one hundred and sixty five years ago."

Kirk glanced towards the computer console. "Spock?"

"There are no Federation vessels in the appropriate range. The closest is the USS Edinburgh, which can be in proper position within two to three months. However, there are a number of foreign organizations in the appropriate range: the Tandar Colonies, the Ferengi Alliance, and the Cardassian Union."

"Tandar's probably out of the question," Kirk said, "and we have no diplomatic contact with the Ferengi and I seriously doubt we ever will... what was the third one?"

"The Cardassian Union," Bailey said.

"Never heard of it."

"The starship Achilles made first contact eighteen years ago. They have had good initial relations with the Federation, despite some internal economic problems."

"What sort of problems?"

"Well, they're at a technical level equivalent to late 20th century Earth, except for having recently developed warp drive and some computer technology that's surprisingly advanced even by our standards. Their home world is resource-poor, so most of their space service is geared for energy exploration. They have a few outlying colonies and deep space telescopes, but only a handful of ships capable of high warp."

"That _might_ work." Kirk drummed his fingers on the table, "Uhura, under my authority, contact the Cardassian government, explain the situation to them and offer to share any information we have in exchange for their cooperation."

Uhura squinted at him, "Are we authorized to do that, Sir? I thought this mission was classified?"

"Technically it is, but our _five-year_ mission is public knowledge, isn't it?"

"Good point..."

"So, if they want to send a ship to join the effort, give them my permission."

"Aye, Captain."

"They'll probably divert the Grazine to join us, Captain," Bailey said, "It's their most advanced starship, the only one outfitted for deep space missions. Her top speed is only about warp five, so maybe three weeks to get here if they have a good navigator."

Kirk squinted at him, "Mister Bailey, are you the local expert on Cardassians or have you simply memorized the specs of every primitive space fleet in the quadrant?"

Bailey shrugged, "I was assigned the Bajor Sector for my thesis, Captain. Cardassia is one of the planets the ancient Bajorans are believed to have colonized."

"Then you'll be our liaison officer when they arrive. Until then," and Kirk addressed it to the entire room, "Continue your analysis, make sure we cover all possible leads before we bring in our partners. Any more questions?" when no one answered after a few moments, Kirk said, "Dismissed."


	9. Chapter 9

**IRRATIONAL**

Doppelgänger Orbit  
USS Enterprise (NCC-1701)  
Stardate 2261.1.1

- 2040 hours -

USS Enterprise was designed to function in deep space for months or years at a time without ever visiting a starbase. Its interiors were spacious and forgiving, despite being thoroughly compartmentalized and reinforced against fire and exposure damage. In the saucer module - which contained almost the entire volume of the ship's habitation spaces - the inner hull was divided into three concentric rings around the "core" compartment, with each ring divided into sixteen independent compartments with their own life support, batteries and data servers. Command and control spaces and other vital areas of the ship were located closest to the core block, while quarters for ship's company filled out the middle ring of the saucer in sixteen grouped compartments, and the working areas of the ship - machine shops, laboratories, sensor bays and airlocks - dominated the outer ring, closest to the rim.

Each of Enterprise's crew compartments was its own little neighborhood, with turbolift stops accessing each one individually. Crew assignments were arranged so that officers who lived together rarely hard to work together, and since each individual cabins all had connections to the food processors below decks, they didn't even have to eat together. The old human saying "familiarity breeds contempt" wasn't entirely logical, but in alot of cases it was an undeniable truth.

What Security Chief McCahil was finding increasingly puzzling was the few cases where contempt had been bred to absurdity in the _absence_ of familiarity. The number of fights between on-duty officers had more than tripled since New Years, and though on one level he knew this to be the usual holdiay-season dustup, some of the disorder was beginning to exhibit patterns now that he was beginning to see the same faces dragged into his security office over and over again, each time for totally different yet somehow totally same reasons. He'd last seen Lieutenant Onise, for example, after a fist fight with one of his supervisors in the belief that the latter was too friendly with his ex-girlfriend; similar case for Ensign Ayala, who was confined to quarters for three days for tattooing the words "chauvinist pig" on the forehead of one of her inebriated co-workers. His overall conclusion was that both of these people were a pair of misanthropes who were probably secretly in love with each other and hated themselves for it. Having them both dragged into his office at the same time for involvement in the exact same incident was... well, interesting to say the least. "Let me get this straight," McCahil leaned over his desk towards Ayala but fixed his gaze on Onise, "You're reporting Ensign Ayala for... attempted murder? Is that it?"

"Yes, Sir, I am."

McCahil looked at him incredulous. Then he leaned towards Onise and looked at Ayala, "And your contention is that the incident you recorded in your log..."

"It was an accidental shooting, as I reported. Therefore his accusation is groundless and he should be reprimanded for making it."

McCahil raised a brow, "You don't reprimand people for having opinions, Ayala. What I'm more interested in is how the hell you managed to _accidentally_ shoot a man in the testicles with a perfectly functional phaser rifle."

Ayala cleared her throat, struggled to maintain her facade of complete knowledge and control of the situation, "There was some odd behavior in the firing circuit. It had happened once before and I thought it was going to discharge so I tried to warn the Lieutenant. He didn't listen."

"Your warning was a _threat_!" Onise snarled at her, "You were mad just becau-"

"First of all," McCahil cut him off, "If your overshield had been active at the time like it was supposed to be, the phaser blast wouldn't have affected you at all. You should be reprimanded just for that. Second of all, a phaser on low stun at a distance of five meters, discharged into the lower abdomen, is not a life threatening injury. Not even _close_. If anything it'll temporarily lower your sperm count, which isn't such a bad idea considering the duration of this tour. So your accusation is completely groundless."

Onise sighed, "Yes, Sir, but..."

"As for the accident report..." McCahil shook his head, "I'm having trouble buying this, Ensign."

"Respectfully, Sir, I'm not _selling_ it. It's just a fact."

"Then how do you explain the operation log from the targeting monocle that suggests the phaser discharged intentionally?"

"The unit malfunctioned, Sir. I can't explain why it wouldn't reflect that fact. In any case, I had determined by myself that the malfunction was in the fire control circuit, which I have already replaced with a spare."

"How convenient."

"You can check that with the maintenance division, Sir."

"I intend to. Either way, consider yourself on report." Leaning towards her, but turning back to Onise, McCahil asked, "Now, what's _your_ story?"

"My story about what, Sir?"

"Do you have any theories about why one of your shipmates might desire to _intentionally_ shoot you in the gonads?"

"Simple malice, Chief."

"That's one theory... but see, most of the time when someone is pissed off enough to take a phaser to you, they'll just shoot you in the back and then claim ignorance. This is called "fragging." It usually happens to an officer with a big mouth and a small mind, which based on your record is you in a nutshell. But see, I'm curious right now as to what exactly would prompt one of your fellow officers to specifically shoot you in the _nuts_."

Onise cleared his throat and struggled to maintain his facade of complete knowledge and control of the situation, "I didn't want to say anything, Lieutenant, but... well, during the away mission, and even before that, Ensign Ayala's behavior has been incredibly erratic."

"Really?"

Onise nodded, "I um... well, the Ensign has made a number of advances... sexual advances, Lieutenant."

Ayala looked at him sideways, as if he was claiming to be in contact with the Virgin Mary.

McCahil's expression was little different. "Really?"

"I believe Ensign Ayala was angry with me for rejecting those advan-"

"You know what, forget I asked. You two... I don't know what the hell is going on with you and I really don't care. You need to pull your heads out of your asses and focus on your damn jobs. Is that understood?"

"Yes Sir," they both said.

"Now," McCahil turned his attention to his desktop computer and pulled up their personnel files, "Lieutenant Onise, you're berthed in 212, port side. Ayala you're in 204, starboard side. Obviously, there's no reason you should run into each other while off duty, so take steps to keep it that way. I'm also changing your duty roster so you'll never have to _work_ with each other again either. And let me make this clear: if you can't find it in your combined willpower to get along with each other, you do us all a favor and avoid any further contact for the duration of this mission. Is this understood?"

"Yes, Sir," they both said in unison.

"Good. Now get the hell out of my office. Ayala, you go first. Onise, stay for a minute, I need you to drop off a requisition form to the machinists."

Ensign Ayala did go first, not sure if McCahil was going to talk privately with Onise, and not really caring. She walked out of his office and down the pristine, shiny white corridors of the administrative section to the nearest turbolift, conveniently parked at the stop just for her. Four seconds later, the lift opened to an identical but light blue colored corridor - color coded for her residential section - which, in turn, lead into the vast open space of the "Iron Town," Compartment 204.

No other starship in the fleet had accommodations like this, and Enterprise probably wouldn't survive without it. Like all the other Junior Officer's areas, Iron Town was a large open atrium two decks high with sun-spectrum lights built into the ceiling and a set of strategically placed circulation fans hidden in the bulkheads, all for a fairly convincing sensation of being outdoors. This single compartment had twenty two double-bunk cabins, two small lounge areas with seating for a dozen officers and a sub deck with storage compartments for emergency supplies and survival gear in the event of a ship-wide catastrophe. It reminded Ayala of one of Earth's indoor shopping malls, only a little more cozy and a lot less crowded.

In some ways, the ground level "lobby" floor was the center of social life for each compartment, and Iron Town 204's lobby contained a green faux-grass garden lined with imitation park benches and a large empty platform where some kind of statue was probably supposed to have been mounted before Enterprise left space dock. Presently, that statue was occupied by a mechanical pitching machine firing sixteen-inch softballs at a spot in the courtyard that had been emptied of tables by Ensign Meaney and Lieutenant Badjarule, the latter holding a wooden baseball bat and crouched in a stance, a mangled officer's field manual doubling as home plate. A few others sitting off to the side were half watching the game and half chatting amongst themselves, Ensign Meaney being in the midst of it all along with Ensign Riley and Lieutenant Sulu. Ensign Torens and Ensign Doyle were there too, but not engaging the others in conversation; actually, they had both squeezed into a single chair in one corner of the table where they were both intensely and lovingly admiring each other's eyes.

The pitching machine fired off another salvo, Badjarule swung and blasted the softball towards the far uppermost corner of the room where it bounced off a structural column and began a chaotic, pinball-like ricochet around the compartment. Perhaps a dozen officers standing in the lobby and the balcony tracked the ball's progression, ready to reach out and grab it if it should come within range. Some of these officers were playing in the game, knowing that whoever caught the ball before it hit the deck would get the next turn at bat, while others were just enjoying the novelty of having to not-get-hit by a wayward softball. Naturally, anyone who didn't want to be bothered by a shipboard softball game was either in their quarters or safely tucked way behind Badjarule's line of fire.

Ayala wasn't in the mood for ball games today, but she didn't wan to retreat to the relative seclusion her cabin yet. She found an empty seat at the table with the others and quietly dropped into it. A conversation was under way, currently dominated by Ensign Meaney, in the middle of explaining, "It's a fact of sentient life forms. Everyone has this one pet peeve that drives them totally insane. Just the mention of the subject makes them crazy. _At least one_, but everyone does. It's like a psychological berserk button."

Ensign Torens looked dubious, but not actively so. Just bored with Meaney's usual nonsense and eager to talk about something else. "If you say so..."

"I'll prove it. See, I happen to know Lieutenant Sulu's berserk button is the idea of having a food slot on the bridge."

Sulu looked at him angrily, "Don't you start _that_ again."

Meaney shrugged, "What? Don't you think it be nice to have a food slot on the bri-"

Sulu came half out of his chair, "_No_ it wouldn't be nice to have a food slot on the goddamn bridge! What the hell is wrong with you?! It's a command station, not a cafeteria! How the hell do you have time to _eat_ something in the middle a bridge rotation?! The whole shift is only four hours long! You can't wait a couple of damned hours to get something to eat?! Christ! If you're that hungry in a duty cycle, you'd better be curled in a diabetic seizure, call a goddamn medical emergency if you can't wait _two freaking hours_ for the next cycle! What are you, _bored_?! Do you not have enough to do on the bridge that you have to sit their munching on fried chicken every fifteen goddamn minutes?! This is a starship, not a buffet table you fat bastard!"

Not even halfway through Sulu's tirade, everyone within earshot had fully collapsed into hysterical laughter. Including Torens, who found the entire display not only hilarious, but completely unprecedented.

And Meaney wasn't even finished. Gasping for breath, he slapped the table a few times to get his composure and then offered sheepishly, "Okay, no food slot... how about a coffee maker?"

A vein popped out on Sulu's forehead, "Oh yeah, that's _exactly_ what I want sitting on my console during combat maneuvers, a big dumbass pot of _hot-freaking-coffee_! How about we install some water fountains in the engine room too? You never know when those high voltage lines might get ya thirsty! Christ! How the hell did you get on this ship if you can't make it through a duty cycle with a goddamn coffee pot plugged into your gut?! You can do what the rest of your shipmates do and get your coffee from the _galley_, you thirsty son of a bitch!"

Ensign Riley was laughing so hard his face had turned bright red. Torens and Ayala were already hunched over the table in spasms. Meaney was quietly chuckling to himself at having pushed Sulu to the edge of madness for the fourth time today, and it didn't seem like the man would ever become any less irritated by the very mention of the subject. And as he had before, he diffused the entire mood by commenting simply, "How about a tea kettle?"

Sulu started to launch another rant. Then he thought better of it, and seemed to immediately return to his usual calm, collected, thoughtful personage they had all come to know and love. "Tea's fine," he said gently, "It's good for you."

"Damn, Hikaru," Ayala rasped, wiping tears from her eyes, "Just _damn_."

Sulu shrugged, "Don't even talk. We all know what it takes to set _you_ off."

"What? What do you mean?"

Not that it was meant to set off Ayala, but it definitely triggered something close to the surface in the rest of her comrades. All eyes turned to her, and the expressions of five officers turned to accusing scowls.

"Okay... what'd I do?" Ayala asked in protest.

Meaney was the first to ask, "Is it true that you shot Lieutenant Onise in the balls?"

Ayala shrank a little bit. "So what if it is? We gonna have a problem here?"

Sulu shrugged, "Don't get so defensive, I mean this is _Onise_ we're talking about, he probably deserved it. We're all just wondering... you know... what exactly was he doing that would prompt you to shoot him in the _balls_?"

"Quick question," Ensign Riley held up a hand, "Why does Onise deser-"

"Shut up, Riley." Meaney turned his attention back to Ayala, "He didn't... you know... _try_ something, did he?"

Ayala's first thought was, for the sake of rumor control, she might as well let everyone go on thinking the worst so at least they wouldn't look down on her for loosing her temper. On the other hand, she understood that she was messing with forces she couldn't really control and opted to keep her exaggerations as small as possible. "We had an argument to that effect... but I maintain _for the record_ that phaser discharged accidentally."

"So, well... _off the record, _what happened down there?"

"He didn't try anything but he was getting ready to."

"What do you mean?" Riley asked, "Did he threaten you?"

"He'd assumed an aggressive posture."

Long glances cycled the table as everyone there tried to figure out what she was talking about.

Ayala's cheeks turned blue as she started to blush, "I saw that he was flexing some of his muscles in preparation for a certain action..."

"He had an erection," Badjarule said, half listening to the conversation from home plate.

Everyone sat up and looked at Badjarule, then at Ayala in amazement.

Ayala hung her head. "I honestly thought I was in danger. But I really never meant to shoot him."

"I don't believe that for a minute," Meaney grumbled, "And besides, I hope you're aware, human males don't have manual control of that part of the anatomy."

"You don't?"

"No, we don't. It's mostly automatic reflexes and instinct. And since I know your next question: No, human women do _not_ have ovisepticles."

"What's an ovisepticle?" Sulu asked.

Meaney said plainly, "Orion men have a prehensile penis. They use it to move egg sacks from one chamber to the next, sort of like an elephant's trunk."

Sulu whistled in amazement, "Orion mating must be complicated."

Ayala looked puzzled, "And human mating isn't?"

"It _is_," Badjarule said from home plate, pausing just long enough to swing at the next pitch, "but with Orion men, they have to directly locate the egg sack, fertilize it, then move the sack to an implantation site within about five minutes. With humans, it happens on a microscopic scale and it mostly takes care of itself."

"Then why do your men have ovipositors?" Ayala asked.

Badjarule laughed, then swing at the next pitch and smashed it in a line drive straight towards the main pressure door, "It's really big dumb rod that gets pushed around with brute force. It stiffens during arousal, but other than that they can barely move it at all."

"Wow..." her cheeks turned almost bright blue now and she stared at the table in a state of interminable self-horror. "That actually sounds kind of... romantic."

"Romantic?" Meany asked.

Under his breath, Sulu grumbled, "Is anyone else amazed that this discussion hasn't gotten awkward yet?" Torens and Doyle both nodded in agreement.

"I mean... if you think about it," Ayala went on, "it's sort of an anatomical geiger counter, right? It'll respond automatically to the attractiveness of a nearby female. You can't hide your true feelings, because you don't have conscious control of your ovipositors... huh... In hindsight, I guess I should have taken it as a complement."

Meany started to say something else, but Riley had his attention on the corridor at the other end of the atrium to say, "Apparently we have some trouble controlling turbolifts too."

When they looked in that direction, they saw Lieutenant Onise standing there, scanning the walkways and sky bridges and the alcoves along the bulkheads until he finally located Ayala at the table. Obviously his goal, he approached the table with the kind of arrogant swagger and a look of smug superiority that almost made _Riley_ want to shoot him as he stood up to greet the man, "Aren't you supposed to be on duty, Onise?"

"Shut up, Riley. Ayala, can I have a word with you please?"

Ensign Ayala slowly stood up, then sat back down in her chair facing him.

"In private, Ensign."

"I'm off duty, Lieutenant."

"I'm your superior officer, and I just told you..."

"I'm _your_ superior officer," Sulu interjected, "And I'm telling you to check that attitude in the corridor. We're all having a nice peaceful conversation here, there's no need for all this hostility."

Onise glowered at Sulu, then glowered even harder at Ayala. "Look. McCahill obviously won't do anything to resolve this situation, so I thought we could settle this like adults. So... I... uh... I really think that you owe me an apology."

Ayala chuckled, "I'm sorry you don't have conscious control of your reproductive organs, and I'm sorry I didn't realize that until recently. I'm _not_ sorry my phaser accidentally stunned you in the baby-maker."

"Ensign Ayala..." Onise chuckled lightly, menacingly, "You and I both know, you can't afford to loose this commission. Once Starfleet cuts you loose, there's a whole galaxy full of colorful characters ready to make a new home for you. If that's what you want... well... it _can_ be arranged."

"So could another phaser malfunction..."

"And if you even _try_ that again, I'll make you wish you were never born. One way or the other, you _will_ show me proper respect."

Even Sulu thought this was going a little far. And more to the point, it was a little out of character for Onise, whose most aggressive posture usually stopped at snide sarcasm and a rolling of the eyes. "Kembi, what the hell's gotten into you?"

"Mind your own business, rice picker! I can handle my own woman!"

Everyone at the table looked at Sulu - and Sulu looked back at them - in tickled amazement. The thought they all shared was a universal concern, but Onise didn't _seem_ to be drunk...

To Riley, the turbolift station on the far bulkhead was starting to beacon to him, like a football end-zone to Onise's football-shaped attitude. He stood up from the chair and very firmly, very carefully, gestured for Ayala to stand up, "And we all know how to handle a drunken asshole on a power trip," he pushed her aside and picked up the chair she had been sitting on until now, "And you know what, I think this chair is about to have a malfun-" he spun around and flung the chair, as hard as he could, directly at Onise's head. The Lieutenant was fast enough to dodge the chair, but not fast enough to dodge the suddenly-running Irishman who pounced on him in a dive, grabbed the back of his uniform shirt and pulled it over the top of his head like a hood. Blinded and disoriented, Onise swung his fists in the air, until Sulu and Meaney joined Riley and grabbing him by his arms and legs and flinging him, bodily, into the compartment's turbolift. Sulu punched the code for Main Shuttlebay, and then stepped out before the doors could close on him.

Riley returned to the table to find Ayala beaming at him, a look of joy and gratitude he hadn't seen on a woman since that time he sowed the nose back onto his baby sister's teddy bear. "That was really sweet of you, Riley."

The Ensign laughed nervously, "Awww... well... it was uh..."

"Oh, please, don't get him started," Ensign Meaney said as he rejoined the table, to the agreement of Sulu and Torens.

"Gentleman, I do believe the lady just paid me a compliment. Don't get all salty on me just because you're jealous."

"We're not jealous," Sulu said, "We just hate you. Anyway, what the hell's gotten into _Kembi_ lately? I've never seem him act like that before."

Ayala nodded, "And him talking about 'my woman.' What's _that_ all about?"

"Maybe he's infatuated?" Riley said, "I heard somewhere that Orion woman sometimes emit pheremones that-"

Ayala shot Riley a look so angry, so chillingly violent that for a few seconds he actually forgot how to speak.

"Um... the... I... I mean, it's just a rumor."

"I'm sure you've heard _many_ rumors about Orion women. Let me assure you-"

"God... don't get _her_ started." Meaney grumbled.

Ayala took a deep breath and reconsidered her response, "Maybe some time we'll get together and I'll show you how many of them are true. Until then," Ayala leaned over and kissed him on the cheek, "I still hate you"

Riley sighed, "I'm _so_ confused..."

"Shut up, Riley," Ayala patted him on the cheek with a heartwarming smile and then headed off to the stairway to her quarters on the second level.

Riley watched her go, then buried his head in his arms and groaned in frustration. "Screw you all. And one day I'm gonna marry that girl. And we're gonna have, like, six kids. I'm gonna become an Admiral. And I'm gonna have a whole planet named after me."

Sulu patted him on the shoulder sympathetically, "We know, Riley. _That's_ why we hate you."


	10. Chapter 10

**ENLIST**

Doppelgänger Orbit  
USS Enterprise (NCC-1701)  
Stardate 2261.1.5

- 0940 hours -

"Bones, seriously, what's with the salt shaker?" Miri asked, half complaining and half just curious, "You keep waving that thing around like-"

"It's a scanner head," Doctor McCoy said, finishing his third and final set of physical exams for his patient. If there were any remaining cancer cells somewhere in her body, the mutation cycle would start again, and he didn't want to have to subject her to another round of surgeries if he didn't have to.

"What does it do?" Miri asked.

"It takes detailed sensor readings for my tricorder."

"What's a tricorder?"

McCoy held up the small metallic device sitting on the desk next to her, keeping the readout display facing him. "It's a machine that uses three different senses to gather information. Sight, sound and smell."

Miri raised a brow, "It can _smell_ me?"

McCoy chuckled, and touched a key on the tricorder to change the scanner's mode. Since he was finished with the active scan anyway, he decided to switch to the passive chemical scan - for Miri's amusement - at which point the low-pitched hum from the scanner head became a series of soft clicks. "It analyzes chemical traces in the air," he explained, "Just like the receptors in your nose. Except it's thousands of times more sensitive. Hell, if I programmed it right, it could tell me what you had for breakfast yesterday."

"Cool..." She smiled fondly at the thought. Of course it was just a fancy gadget to her, but in the broader context... it was a fancy gadget on a _space ship_, just like the big glorious space cruisers on those TV shows and DVDs she used to watch, in those early years before running for her life came to consume all her free time. Just a reminder of those easier days-that time of peace and innocence-made her giddy with joy. "So Bones, tell me again: how far are we from Earth?"

"Five thousand kilometers, give or take," the tricorder picked up none of the chemical traces of the cancer tissues from before. It picked up something _else_, though, something it couldn't quite identify and therefore broke down into a list of chemical constituents: oxygen, carbon, phosphorous, hydrogen, nitrogen, and water vapor. The way it was configured it almost looked like an explosive compound. "Have you been handling firearms lately?"

"Not since you zapped me up here. Why do you ask?"

"Oh, nothing..." he tapped another key and the scanner head started to emit an oscillating high-pitched whine.

"What's it doing now?" Miri asked.

"Ultrasound." McCoy passed the scanner over her shoulders and torso, where the most intensive surgeries had removed kilograms of tumors from her chest and abdomen. "I'm making a map of your insides."

Miri folded her arms self-consciously. And maybe just to distract herself from the examination asked, "How far are we from _your_ Earth?"

"I don't remember... hey Ramsi," McCoy waved Doctor Ayash over to the biobed from across the room, distracting the junior surgeon from the all-consuming task of lasering an errant hangnail off his thumb. "How far are we from Sol right now? What was it Spock said?"

"Three hundred and twenty light years," said Doctor Ayash. Using a translator instead of his own rendition of English, his accent had all but vanished. "Which is pretty close in galactic terms."

"How long a travel?"

"Don't know. A month, perhaps, with a skilled navigator."

"I'd like to go there some day." she smiled, her mind light years away, "Maybe even move back to Gaza? Who knows, maybe I might find a copy of myself out there?"

"You're not bothered by that prospect?" McCoy put the scanner away and returned the tricorder to his medical kit, "I don't think I would be comfortable with the idea of having a clone living a whole other life on some other planet."

"Why not?" Miri grinned, "I think that would be neat. Like if there were two of me. We could get a _lot_ of work done."

"Young people and their adaptability..." McCoy chuckled, and as his last act as her surgeon, compared the tricorder readings with her chart displayed on the console screen next to her biobed. "Well, Ramsi?"

Doctor Ayash came to her side and looked at the chart. He nodded in approval, and said to her with a look to match, "Looks like you are having clean bill of health. We can officially set you free."

"Thanks to you and Bones. I was terrified that one day I was going to change into one of those... those..." Miri banished the thought and strategically changed the subject to something a little less terrifying, "So what's your Palestine like, Doctor Ramsi? Don't tell me we're still fighting the Zionists after all these years."

Doctor Ayash smiled warmly, almost patronizingly, "Not exactly."

"Well you must have overcome them somehow or else you wouldn't be here, right?"

Ayash looked at his feet, embarrassed, "There is much history to go through, but I should say that on Earth right now, there is no more Palestine."

Miri's expression dropped a little. Not that she had ever particularly cared about the outcome, but it was growing more and more important for her to place her identity in the scheme of a much larger universe than she was used to. "You mean we lost."

"Not exactly."

"Ugh. Every time you say that phrase 'Not exactly' I know something weird is about to happen."

Ayash chuckled, "I not suppose you know what an Augment is?"

Miri flinched, "Is that... uh... kind of bird?"

"No... bear with me, okay? I am having to try to skip some of the details, so try to keep up."

"Okay..."

"There was a man in the Israeli Government, a few years after your time, named Ehud Jabez. He was intelligent, charismatic, extremely effective leader. He used his intellect to engineer political change all over middle east, installing people he could trust into positions of power, including the Palestinian Authority and even his own government. To make things easier, he unified Israel and Palestine as a single country, divided it into four Federalized districts, two Palestinian and two Jewish. He abolished the racist policies of the extremists and brought both peoples together in peace... for a time."

"What went wrong?"

"As we finding out some years later," Ayash went on sadly, "Jabez was what we came to call Augment: a product of genetic engineering from the Cold War when NATO countries were trying to create race of super-soldiers. Jabez was one of dozens of augments who simultaneously seized control of a few powerful governments. Along with Uday and Qussay Hussein, Pierre DeVries, Pervez Musharoff, Barrack Obama and Khan Noonien Singh... they were all effective leaders, but they were all terribly ambitious. Between them they split up into two camps, an eastern and western coalition lead by DeVries and Jabez on one side and Singh and Musharoff on the other. When the dust finally settled, both sides were ruins, most of the augments were either assassinated or vanished. After Zionist movement collapsed, the Jihadists ran out of things to complain about, Israel remained Federalized, and it having been peaceful ever since."

Miri took this all in, patiently and sagely, like the passionate history student she had once been before circumstance promoted her to Admiral of a fleet of ragtags. "So you mean that entire fifty year struggle for freedom was... what? A historical joke?"

"If it is joke, it was as our expense. I thinking that as a people - both the Palestinians and the Jews - we spent the majority of human history as race of sheep. We have wandering around looking for some good shepherd to lead us. Sometimes it was God images, other times just political leaders. Most of them lead us like lambs to slaughter." By stunning coincidence, the sickbay doors opened as Commander Spock walked into the room, busily studying a palmcomp display while at the same time navigating his way towards Doctor McCoy, "And then we meeting the Vulcans," Ayash nodded at Spock.

The science officer paused, noted his sudden focus of attention, then moved slowly to the Doctor's side. "Can I help you, Doctor?"

"As I have just explaining to the young lady here," Ayash gestured at Miriam, "How mankind having reached a state of clarity thanks to the Vulcans. You see, Miri, an American scientist tested a new star drive for the first time, and a Vulcan space ship noticed the test and following him back to Earth. They make first contact with our people, and finding the planet in chaos, they offering us... I guess you could say 'humanitarian aid' to help us rebuild. It changed everything, our society, our values-"

"Doctor Ayash is, of course, quoting the conventionally accepted history of First Contact, as taught in many European high schools," Spock said, "In truth, humanity remained in a generally barbaric state for another five decades. In point of fact, many regions actually regressed even _deeper_ into authoritarianism and poverty, achieving no significant political or economic progress until the early twenty second century."

Miri looked back and forth between Spock and Ayash, sensing a field of tension beginning to stretch between them.

"We were making some progress," Ayash began.

"You were making _mistakes_," Spock corrected, "The same silly and illogical mistakes your species had _always_ made."

"Now wait a minute..."

"The former Eastern Coalition degenerated into the so-called 'Post Atomic Horror,' a collection of peasant states enforced by drug-addicted mercenaries and ultra conservative jurists using a quasi-Confucian legal system. Even the most enlightened efforts to achieve public order were sabotaged by vested political interests of neighboring partisans."

Bones chuckled, "Like the Tokyo Incident. I almost forgot about that."

"What was Tokyo Incident?" Ayash asked, remembering the name but not the details.

"In 2075, the United States government was implicated in an plot to detonate a thermonuclear warhead near the Vulcan Embassy in Tokyo, apparently in an attempt to sabotage relations between the Vulcan government and the Japanese Empire."

"Why?"

"Because Japan was the central member of the Eastern Coalition," McCoy said, "And arguably the most gruesome member of the Post Atomic Horror. Supposedly it was some cockamamie scheme to get the Vulcans to cut their support to ECON members and lean more towards the Americans. Of course, they got caught red handed and the whole plan backfired."

"Resulting in a new policy, which forced any remaining governments to renounce membership in both WESCON and NATO or face a termination of interplanetary aid," Spock said, "This resulted in the collapse of both organizations, and catalyzed the formation of the United Earth Treaty Organization in 2105, which eventually become the United Earth Government. The social elites who had prospered under WESCON were largely marginalized and continued to denounce Vulcan as an obstructionist power even after Earth joined the United Federation of Planets."

Doctor Ayash looked shocked and disgusted, "That's _completely_ untrue..."

"One second, though," Miri asked, just to make sure she understood correctly, "Most of the people on this ship are from western countries. Like Bones is from America, isn't he? I mean... well, it seems like everything turned out well in the end."

Spock nodded, almost professorial in what was quickly turning into an impromptu history lesson. "It does represent some historical irony. Starfleet, for example, was founded by the embittered elements of those same social elites, mainly in an attempt to compete with the more successful exploration programs of the United Earth government. Indeed, in 2151, Captain Jonathan Archer - commander of the _first_ Enterprise -publicly accused the Vulcan High Command of sabotaging Starfleet's first deep space mission. He was either unaware or unwilling to consider that the Vulcan Space Command had previously provided direct material support to three previous UESPA missions and various elements of the Earth Cargo Service, support that opened the Sol Sector to the galactic economy some thirty years before Starfleet was founded."

"When did all that change?" Miri had her attention focussed completely on Spock now. Not so much because of his superior authority, but only because Spock's version of the story was more compatible with what she already knew about humanity.

Spock almost smiled. "Ironically, it was _our_ illogic that was humanity's salvation."

"What?"

And Ayash looked even more puzzled, "What?"

"At some point, not long before contact with Earth, the Vulcan government came to be dominated by a kind of petty autocracy, not unlike the old Earth systems of the twenty first century. Socially, we had begun to embrace obedience under the banner of logic and order, and in the end we failed to recognize the logic of _dis_obedience towards errant authority figures. Our failure to recognize these problems nearly destroyed us, first during the Syrranite Revolution, and again thirty years later in the Second Romulan War. To some extent, those problems remain unsolved today."

"And _that_ saved humanity?" Ayash asked, astounded, "Really?"

"It is difficult to explain in detail, Doctor. It is ironic that humans could finally banish the creeping elitism in their own society only after witnessing the havoc it had caused in _ours_. Both cultures made the logical choice to abandon privilege in exchange for survival, and the result was the total collapse of the existing class structure in both societies. And even then, humans proved more successful at this than Vulcans."

Ayash took a small step back and thought this over, "_That_ is interesting perspective..."

"But there's always rich and poor in a society," Miri said, "Even when nobody has any money. Somebody always has more than the person next to him."

"True," Spock nodded, "But in a meritocracy, a person is only as valuable as his gifts, not his birthright. The Captain of the _first_ Enterprise, for example, is widely believed to have gained his command through family connections to Starfleet's upper echelons. Several more experienced command officers - many with thousands of hours of deep space experience - were rejected without explanation."

Ayash snickered, "Not unlike the Captain of _this_ Enterprise..."

"If you are referring to Captain Kirk, I'll remind you that his mastery of this vessel comes with the blessing of several command officers far more experienced than _you_."

"Same difference... but still, he is much less experienced than John Archer was."

Miri asked before Spock could get too far, "Who is Captain Kirk?"

"The commander of this vessel, and a source of controversy within Starfleet. His service record has placed him increasingly at odds with some of the more conservative figures of Starfleet's chain of command."

"He is also youngest Captain in Starfleet history," Ayash added, "Hell, he was not even active duty officer when disabling that Romulan doomsday weapon."

Drifting into earshot, Doctor McCoy sidled into the conversation in his usual abrupt manner, "He's a _hero_ is what he is. I don't care how young he is, it took some major cojones to pull of that little stunt on the Vengeance..." and exchanging palmcomps with Spock added, "Hell, he nearly gave his _own_ life just to save all of ours."

"If you are ask me," Ayash said, "_Spock_ should have getting command."

"Then it is fortunate, Doctor, that no one asked you. I have no present ambitions to command this or any other vessel." Spock looked at the palmcomp, then nodded with satisfaction. Turning to Miri he added, "Now that you have been medically cleared, I shall have had the duty officer arrange quarters for all of you, but since we do not know the details of relationships I leave it up to you, Miri, to see to berthing accommodations."

Miri squinted at him, and Doctor McCoy promptly translated, "He's saying we need you to help pick rooms for the Onlies."

"Oh... sure, I can help with that. But before I do, there's something else I wanted to ask about."

"And that is?"

Miri smiled nervously, "I... um... well, I know I'm not exactly the best and brightest, and I know astronauts are supposed to be some kind of geniuses, but I was thinking maybe about joining the crew here? Perhaps becoming a doctor like Mister Ayash?"

Spock tilted his head slightly, "Your medical qualifications do not seem adequate for that task... however, if your desire is genuine you may be able to pass the physical and mental requirements for cadet training."

McCoy snorted, "You've got to be kidding me..."

"Trainee duties are not overly complicated, Doctor, and Enterprise does have facilities adequate for field training." For a moment or two, he actually looked Miri in the eye, probed her resolve for any cracks or pretenses. Finding none, he concluded safely, "If you are willing to learn, we are willing to train you."

"I am, Sir. Completely. Ever since I was a little kid I always used to dream about being an astronaut."

"This may not live up to your expectations. A life in Starfleet can be difficult, dangerous, frightening, and often surreal. Much of what you may encounter on this ship will certainly exceed the grasp of both your knowledge and your imagination. Are you prepared for that?"

Miri smiled, "I'm on a space ship, Mister Spock. This is already _way_ beyond my knowledge. And don't underestimate my imagination."

"Then I will arrange to have the duty officer meet with you tomorrow evening. Until then, your first duty as cadet will be to see to quartering arrangements for the other refugees by 1400 hours tomorrow."

"Uh... sure... y-yes sir, Commander!" Miri jumped off the table and saluted.


	11. Chapter 11

**COOPERATION**

Doppelgänger Orbit  
USS Enterprise (NCC-1701)  
Stardate 2261.3.4 - Captain's Log

_Enterprise is now eight weeks in orbit of the planet Starfleet has officially named Doppelgänger. Mister Spock's theory about "planetary chronological instability" or "rapid aging" seems mostly confirmed. Orbital observations show the Gaza Strip region where we recovered survivors three weeks ago has decayed into ruins, seemingly thousands of years old. The instabilities are also having damaging effects on the planet itself; seismic irregularities continue to escalate, and ambient radiation levels on the planet's surface have increased four hundred percent since our last landing party scouted the Andean Mountain region a week ago._

_Aboard the ship, morale is relatively high, though we're still faced with the problem of what to do with those twenty four survivors we brought on board. They seem happy to be out of danger, but they're anxious about their futures. Understandable, I guess. Doctor McCoy has explained the situation to them as best he can, but I imagine this is quite a bit to take in even for the best adjusted of them. Ensign Hallab seems to be coping best of all of them, though I can't say whether this is because of her greater maturity or the welcome distraction of her newfound duties, or maybe both._

_The Cardassian Union has responded to our request for assistance on the condition that we coordinate with their space service and share all information we can obtain about this planet and its creators. We're still awaiting the arrival of their flag ship - the Grazine - with the long-range sensor images we commissioned two weeks ago. I've been reviewing the contact reports from the Achilles on Cardassian culture to prepare for the meeting; Captain Balze's impression was that the Cardassians are generally an insecure, suspicious, yet deeply passionate people, not too different from some humans I know. Culturally and technologically they're equivalent to 20th century Earth norms. Hopefully we'll be able get along..._

_We are definitely _not_ getting along with the Gorn. We have been broadcasting our offer of assistance for twelve days, but the response remains 'stand by.' Lieutenant Uhura has detected a massive subspace distortion from the Gorn vessel that is probably a long range transmission to their home base. Let's hope the response yields good news for us._

.

- 1240 hours -

The Enterprise's many interlocked compartments constituted a kind of "double hull" within the protective cocoon of the hull plating; strip away the outer hull, and the ship would appear as a vast maze of independent modules and connecting tunnels and turbolift tubes. The turboshafts were probably the most important artery for the ship's functioning, because they also doubled as the spinal supports of high-voltage power conduits, water and oxygen supply lines from the engineering module, and a network of much smaller turboshafts that branched off through the entire ship to recreation sections and crew quarters. The system was designed with such efficiency that someone - Doctor McCoy, for example - could select an item from the food slot's menu in the officer's lounge, then count to ten, and at the end of that time hear the buzzing/hissing sound of a turbocar race under his feet to its final destination in the slot in front of him. Finally the slot doors opened to a tiny transport car containing two small plastic trays which, between the two of them, supported a bowl of grits, half a grapefruit, a plastic cup of grape soda, two deviled eggs, a chicken sandwich and a cup of coffee.

Somehow the replicator system hadn't processed these as separate orders despite arranging them on two different trays. McCoy set them on a table next to the gigantic officer's lounge windows that arced high overhead like a gigantic greenhouse and then got to the complicated puzzle-breaking task of dividing up his order from the Captain's.

Kirk took the sandwich right away, then set the coffee in front of him, but it took two tries and multiple exchanges to figure out how many sugar packets were for the coffee and how many were for McCoy's grits until the doctor grudgingly conceded all of them to Kirk and spooned his grits in the raw. "It's better plain anyway," Kirk said, stirring his coffee triumphantly.

"When I was little my mother used to make it with honey."

"Ew..."

"Try it sometime, it's a good satisfying breakfast. Hell, if those fabricators didn't churn out that sickly abomination the galley section laughably calls 'honey' I'd have that instead."

Kirk nodded in agreement. "It reminds me of sugar-free gelatin."

"It reminds me of modeling glue. Speaking of sweetness," McCoy craned his head towards the hatch, which had half a second ago opened for Commander Spock on his way through it. Kirk turned his head just in time to miss the Vulcan land a parting kiss on the cheek of Lieutenant Uhura before making his own way to the food slot behind them. "Where exactly are those two going?"

"What?"

"Spock and Nyota."

Kirk raised a brow. "_Are_ they going someplace? What are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about their future, Jim. What are the statistics of human-Vulcan family combinations? That can't be an easy thing to pull off."

"_Spock's_ parents did it well enough."

"Jim..."

"C'mon, Bones, Spock knows what he's doing." He checked and made sure Spock wasn't quite in earshot yet and added, "I just hope he _also_ knows what a lucky bastard he is..." and now that Spock was closing in, tray in hand, "Care to join us, Commander?"

Spock acknowledged with a nod and dropped into a chair between the two. He set down a tray that contained an odd mixture of multi-colored polygons that were either children's building blocks or a salad composed of impeccably diced exotic fruits. Whatever it was it had an oddly soothing sweet and sour aroma to it; McCoy wondered what it would taste like with grits.

Kirk asked immediately, "You seem preoccupied, Spock," and took a bite of his sandwich while he awaited a reply.

"Indeed, Captain. I have been mulling a matter of extreme personal importance since this mission began, and recent events have only exacerbated my dilemma."

"Dilemma?" McCoy asked.

"In what way?" Kirk added, as if he already knew what Spock was thinking but only needed the details.

Spock sighed, "As you might have guessed, I have a great personal stake in discovering the technology that created this planet. I am, after all, a member of a species that has recently been deprived of a homeworld, and such technology may prove essential to the survival of the Vulcan race."

"Yeah, no kidding..."

"This has been on my mind constantly since discovering this planet. However, our findings with the sapient life forms - Miri, for example - have lead me to consider another strange possibility."

Kirk took another bite of his sandwich and waited patiently for Spock to continue.

"The same power that created this planet," Spock said, "that created a duplicate Earth... it is possible, if unlikely, that a duplicate Vulcan may _already_ exist."

McCoy said, "If your theory is correct, this planet may have been created in the first place just to harvest an extinct cetacean species..."

"Quite right, Doctor. But the possibility exists that the force that created this duplicate Earth may have a reason to preserve endangered species from a multitude of worlds, for whatever reason. Since we do not know the method of duplication, I am intrigued by the possibility that Vulcan may also have been so preserved."

Kirk nodded, "It sounds like a ray of hope, Spock."

Spock raised a brow, "Hope is an emotional yearning, Captain, and a completely illogical proposi-"

"Hope," Kirk cut him off, "is the most logical thing in the universe for a people on the brink of extinction."

"Perhaps." Spock dug into his meals with some type of pointed utensil, something that reminded Kirk of a type of miniature Gun. The colored rectangles made deep indistinct crunching noises when Spock bit down.

"What is that, exactly?" McCoy said.

Spock pointed with the barb in his hand, "This is pat'su, kriyat, selit, and tofu."

"Reprocessed vegetable matter from four planets." Kirk shook his head in amazement and sipped his coffee, "You're a braver man than _I_ am."

"Most carbon based life forms have similar protein and amino acid requirements. Probably a matter of chemistry and convergent evolution." Spock took two more consecutive bites, one of a green and another of a yellow rectangle. He chewed, he swallowed, he contemplated for a moment and then added, "I am wondering whether or not we share sufficient cultural commonalities to open communications with the Gorn."

Washing down a mouthful of grits, McCoy asked, "You mean diplomatically or at this particular moment?"

"Both, Doctor, but obviously the more immediate circumstances remain foremost on my mind."

Kirk shrugged, "Sulu thinks they came here on a fishing expedition. But even without knowing that, it's a foregone conclusion that their goals and priorities are different from ours. Remember, the last time we encountered them they were in the middle of conquering an entire planet and would have done the same to New Vulcan if we hadn't stopped them. This planet may _look_ like Earth, but it's not ours to defend. We should give them a wide berth and let them do whatever it is they do."

"That would be my impression too, Sir. However," he frowned slightly, "we learned of the Gorn's motives through a conversation between Sulu and the one called The Runner. It is a safe assumption that the Gorn scout presented a similar report to his superiors on arrival on his ship, in which case the Gorn are now well aware of our reason for being here."

McCoy nodded, "So they know this planet is a duplicate."

"Precisely, Doctor. This fact may have sparked their curiosity, since clearly a force that can create and engineer planets would be as attractive to them as it is to us."

"Of course. You can design a planet that'll support whatever delicacies you want." Kirk smiled, "A kind of planetary-scale agriculture program."

"Indeed."

McCoy asked, "You're thinking we should make contact with them?"

"If their interest in the planet is as strong as ours, a mutual exchange of knowledge _would_ be the most logical arrangement."

"What about security? Whatever we find here is bound to be classified top secret by the Federation Council."

"Yes, but we're already involving the Cardassians," Kirk said, "Besides, according to the Federation Charter, the Council cannot classify information it does not yet have."

"_Starfleet_ can."

"Starfleet hasn't. And I agree with Spock on this one. If the Gorn could be of help to us, it doesn't hurt to ask."

McCoy shrugged, "If you say so. But don't say I didn't warn you... by the way, Jim, I meant to tell you yesterday, this pointy-eared lunatic just approved an enlistment application from one of the Onlies."

Kirk smiled, "One of the children?"

"Ensign Miriam Hallab is sixteen years old," Spock said, "her qualifications include a demonstrated proficiency in problem solving skills, as well as extensive maritime experience. Her physical health and fitness are above average, as are her scores for gross memory retention, visual-spatial reasoning and marksmanship. Counselor Giza has performed a full psychological evaluation and deemed her fit for duty."

"Par for the course," Kirk shrugged, "I don't see the problem."

"The problem, Jim, is that this girl just spent the last few years of her life in the festering ruins of a dead planet. I don't see how she could possibly adjust to life on a starship."

Kirk chuckled, "How did any of _us_ get used to it? That's the whole reason we have shakedown cruises, to help break in the _crew_. A starship has to get test-flown and certified before it even gets a _name_."

"I still worry, Jim. This is a big adjustment for her, I don't want to dump too much in her lap before she's ready."

"You're CMO, Bones. The mental health of the crew _is_ your responsibility."

McCoy nodded, "Trust me, I'll keep an eye on her."

"Your concern is admirable, Doctor, but unwarranted," Spock said.

"Really, Spock? You being the expert on human nature..."

"Human history, Doctor. Need I remind you that the force that created this planet also duplicated its inhabitants in painstaking detail. Did it not occur to you that the survivors may _themselves_ be duplicates of real people alive on Earth during the twenty first century?"

McCoy considered that for a moment, then looked at Spock in amazement, "I take it you found the original Miri?"

Spock recited the biographical page from memory, having finally received a response to his inquiries from the United Earth historical archives, "Lieutenant Colonel Miranda Anderson, also known as Miriam Hallab, born in Gaza City on January 31st, 1994. Twice detained by security forces in 2008 and 2010 for collaboration with Hamas, later gained Israeli citizenship under the Jabez Federalist reforms in 2016. She joined the Israeli airforce under an assumed name and later claimed more than forty seven confirmed victories against Pakistani aircraft during the Eugenics Wars. She moved to the United States in 2025, entered astronaut training that same year. Commanded two Jupiter expeditions on DY-500 class vessels, later assigned to Mission Commander of extrasolar mission USS Calypso in 2036, the first manned expedition to successfully probe beyond the Solar system. Personal information is hard to come by, but statements by her peers and her ex-husband described her as a workaholic, a genius, and was described by an older sibling as, quote, 'Too damn stubborn to fail at anything.'"

"I like her already," Kirk chuckled, "Spock's right, Bones. If she _is_ a copy of Miranda Anderson, I'm sure she'll fit in just fine."

.

- 1920 hours -

"I have your vector, Mister Chekov," Lieutenant Uhura was saying as Kirk arrived on the bridge, "Set coordinates for beacon one eight zero four."

"Beacon one eight zero four, aye. Computing coordinates now..."

Lieutenant Bailey at the helm took thruster control now, "Coming to assigned coordinates," Through the view-screen window, Kirk saw the stars swirling as the ship turned, the disk of the planet below dropping out of sight below the rim of the saucer. Finally the ship stopped, properly oriented in space with its main deflector pointed in the right direction to send a subspace signal to Starfleet Command. As per standing orders, every starship was required to transmit log entries and telemetry data to the nearest sector command base every two to four days, or failing that, to drop a recorder marker on autonomous return trajectory. The catch was, a starship's subspace transceiver only had enough power to transmit over relatively short distances of up to a few dozen light years. Longer range transmissions required the greater power of the ship's main deflector, acting in this case as a kind of electrogravitic megaphone that could blast the ship's digital voice halfway across the galaxy or, in burst transmissions, even to _other_ galaxies.

Chekov had now turned the ship to aim the deflector at a Federation relay satellite near the Vulcan Corridor, which would pick up the message, process it for clarity and destination, then route that message through the communications network until it reached the transceiver array at the Epsilon Hydrae colony where the computers would recognize it as Starfleet traffic and route it to directly to UESPA's Daystrom Institute. Far off in the distance came the low rumble, rising into a mechanical whine as the warp core channeled its full power to the main deflector. Uhura worked her communications console for a few moments, then got the response from the computer and replied, "Transmission complete," at which point the sound from the deflector dish faded out.

Kirk took his seat only now, not wanting to break the flow of activity in the middle of an operation that had cost the Lieutenant forty minutes of her own leisure time. On a mission of this great political importance, Kirk knew it was unwritten protocol to make these transmissions with greater regularity and thoroughness than usual, and the entire communications section had its hands full pulling the many thousands of terabytes of information together. Naturally, transmitting from this deep in a stellar gravity well, it would take slightly under two hours for Starfleet to _receive_ the transmission, and longer still to transmit a response. "Chekov, what's the ETA on our Cardassian friends?"

"Their last signal gave a distance of three hundred and fifty milliparsecs. At their present speed of warp four, they should arrive here within thirty six hours."

Kirk felt satisfied that the wait was nearly over. Enterprise had been loitering in orbit of this planet for nearly two weeks, incessantly probing the surface of a world that stubbornly refused to yield any further secrets to them. Maybe at long last they would get some answers, or at least, they'd have a better understanding of what questions to ask. "What should we expect from that ship, Mister Bailey?"

"The Grazine is a deep space exploration cruiser, basically the Cardassian's equivalent of the Enterprise. Its equipment is unsophisticated but versatile. They don't have a lot of experience, but their space service is highly disciplined and well trained."

"Tactical capabilities?"

"As far as I know, their main offensive weapons are projectile weapons and fission devices. No shields, no deflectors, just missile-based point defense and some sophisticated jamming devices. Also, Cardassian ships are powered by fusion reactors so they have a very limited fuel capacity, especially at high warp."

Kirk grinned. "Chekov, punch up Constellation's survey report for the rest of this system..."

"Scans show two gas giants in the Jupiter-Saturn range and one in close orbit of the central star," Chekov reported immediately, having already pulled up that report in anticipation of the request, "the inner planet has a plentiful supply of deuterium and tritium in its upper atmosphere that could be extracted for fuel processing."

The turbolift doors snapped open and Kirk noted Spock's arrival, palmcomp in one hand, tricorder in the other. He knew without having to ask that the Vulcan had just completed another up-close survey of the reaver specimens they brought aboard the Enterprise from Gaza; he also knew from the Vulcan's body language that this session had been as fruitless as all the others. Even so, "Any news from our house guests?"

Spock shook his head, "Both reaver specimens remain uncommunicative and insufferably hostile. I might be tempted to offer them my pity, _if_ they were capable of understanding the concept."

Turning back to Uhura Kirk asked, "Any reply from the Gorn, Lieutenant?"

"None sir, not even a response to stand by."

"Have they received an answer from their home world yet?"

"I don't know, but there's been no anomalous subspace traffic so I doubt it."

"Keptin," Chekov started to boil in his chair again, overly excited as usual whenever anything happened on the Gorn ship, "Picking up another landing craft departing from the alien wessel. Entering low orbit approach, descending towards the planet."

Kirk chewed his thumbnail for a moment, slightly worried, but mostly curious. "Spock, how are the Gorn selecting their landing sites? They've dropped a dozen teleporters in the past few days..."

"Nothing more substantial than previous analysis. Their away teams seem to be focussed on coastal areas and jungle terrain where large insects and invertebrates can be found in abundance. They have very rarely deviated from this pattern, but it must also be remembered that short-range teleport relays can allow Gorn away teams to transport from the landing platform to remote locations with relative ease. We may simply not be aware of all of their surface activities."

Kirk nodded, "Makes sense... so where's _this_ one headed?"

Chekov punched in the numbers and displayed a graphic on the main viewer, "Southern England, Keptin."

Spock raised a brow, "Curious... apart from harvesting of invertebrate life forms, the Gorn's only interest in this planet has been a catalog of its space launch facilities and industrial sectors. There is very little in their destination zone consistent with this pattern."

"How long until that capsule lands?"

"At present course, it should make planetfall in one hour and fifteen minutes."

Kirk almost jumped out of his chair on his way to the turbolift, barking as he went, "Spock, we're beaming down. Uhura, have Doctor McCoy and a security escort meet us in transporter room one..." and then it suddenly occurred to him, "And have Miri join us as well. At the moment she's our resident expert on this planet."


	12. Chapter 12

**THE ONLIES**

Doppelgänger Orbit  
USS Enterprise (NCC-1701)  
Stardate 2261.3.4

- 1900 hours -

The guest quarters in Compartment 102 were usually set aside for civilian guests, the sort of passengers and evacuees who needed to be brought aboard as something less than crew but more than cargo. Mainly for this reason, C102 didn't have the large spacious atriums of the other habitat compartments, or even its port-side counterpart, VIP suites in Compartment 114. It was a much more traditional habitation space, essentially a conglomeration of airtight cylinders packed together in an array, joined by common access tunnels through which the Enterprise's familiar corridors joined the different modules and the half-dozen two-person suites crammed into each of them. Three weeks earlier, Miri had helped arrange her fellow refugees - who sill called themselves "the Onlies" - into something of a working order not too different from where they had been when they were still the ad hoc crew of her father's fishing boat. That all twenty four of them could fit into just two modules - along a single length of corridor with pressure doors at both ends - was both convenient and fortunate, since most of the children didn't _completely_ trust their saviors after all.

Actually, neither did Miri. Certainly she had no doubt of their intentions, in fact she was still half convinced that this was a ship of angels sent by God just to deliver them to paradise. What she doubted was their understanding of the situation at hand, and their ability to predict everything that might go wrong with their current mission. It may have been a vibe she'd picked up from the senior officers, or maybe just experience from her own struggle for survival and all the strange things that seemed to go wrong with her world. But even with all their technology and knowledge, the Enterprise's crew was only human, and they no more understood what was happening to her world than she did.

So Leila and Nabi set up defenses. Quietly, discretely, and always out of sight of the security officers who guarded this length of corridor. Miri used her status as a Ensign-in-training to get access to the cargo bay, and from there she'd managed to recover _most_ of their weapons, plus a few other goodies that Lieutenant York's people had found. Using these, Ramsi and Jasmine had managed to rig the doors of all twelve quarters with old clusterbombs and a crude but reliable fuse that could be armed and disarmed with a pull string or a switch, just in case someone decided to enter who didn't believe in knocking. Sami and The Other Jasmine drew up a patrol schedule, so at any given time at least six of the children were stationed in the corridor, two at each junction just beyond the pressure door armed with well-hidden Steyer guns and two at the midpoint with RPKs. Then during Spock's training seminar she learned more about the actual layout of the ship, and with its double-hulled configuration the fact that there was nothing beyond the walls of the corridor but vacuum and forcefields; at that point, Miri revised their defense plans, planning escape routes through the access tubes and providing six of the Onlies - one for each patrol watch - with the access codes for the emergency bulkheads, and then spent the better part of the next week teaching her crew how to use the space suits.

Since then, the Onlies had learned most of the safety and auxiliary systems of their little slice of the ship, and except for occasional (and predictable) visits from Doctor Ayash, were mostly left to their own devices for the better part of the month. That their little section of the corridor was technically a pair of completely independent modules with their own battery and life support systems (if only for emergency use) was not lost on them, and by now they had come to consider this part of the Enterprise to be already _their_ space ship. And Peter the Rabbit had already sent out feelers and discovered what the most acceptable name for their ship would be. "We should call it Al-Kahf!"

Miri looked at him surprised and amazed, as if he'd suddenly grown a feathers and a second pair of arms. "Are you serious?"

"Absolutely!" Peter the Rabbit sat down behind the short little desk in the two-bunk cabin he'd shared with The Other Jasmine for most of the month. Miri couldn't remember what she came in here to talk with him about, she'd only found him in here bouncing around, totally excited for some reason when he suddenly announced his good news. "It totally fits what we're going through right now, don't you think?"

Miri thought about it, and in a vague sense she figured he was right. On the other hand, Peter the Rabbit - whatever his real name was, nobody could remember anymore - was the only one of the Onlies who might actually pass for religious, unlike Miri, who never got much farther than a vague half-remembrance of what Al-Kahf was actually about. "Weren't there only _seven_ sleepers in the cave?"

"That's not the point. The thing is, they fell asleep in the cave and they didn't wake up for three hundred years. When they finally came out again, there was nobody left to persecute them."

"Right..."

"Oh, and then there's the part about the Green One."

Miri squinted at him.

"Don't you remember?"

"Why would I? I haven't _seen_ a Quran in six years."

Peter the Rabbit rolled his eyes. "He's that crazy ancient prophet that taught Moses, and then Mohammed taught him."

"Oh, I get it." Miri smiled, "You're thinking we can teach these Starfleet guys a thing or two."

Peter the Rabbit flashed a big toothy grin and nodded.

"You're insane, you know that? These people are three times your age and most of them have been to college. You didn't even finish _kindergarten_."

"Yeah, but what do they know about Earth? Nothing, that's what. They've only seen a few parts of it and they haven't seen what we've seen. Plus, we still haven't told them about the dreams."

Miri stared at him for a moment, grappling with the implications of this. "What difference does _that_ make? They're just dreams."

"They're premonitions."

"No they're not. _Obviously_ not since none of the things we dreamed about are ever going to happen. I mean, think about this, we're already on a space ship right now, and this ship looks _nothing_ like the one from the dream. And besides only seven of us in this entire group even _have_..." it occurred to her now what Peter was getting at. She wasn't sure even he realized what an odd coincidence it was until just this minute, how the fates just seemed to line up to put it all together. "How does that verse go again?"

Peter the Rabbit actually had the page up on his monitor - and so ended the mystery of his sudden scriptural recall - and read the passage breezily, "You would have seen the sun rise and set, from the right side to the left, while they lay in the open space in the middle of the Cave. You would have thought they were awake, while they were asleep, and We turned them on their right and on their left sides: their dog stretching forth his two fore-legs on the threshold. If you had come up on to them then, you would have turned back and fled, you'd be filled with terror from the sight of them. Such as they were, we roused them from their sleep, that they might question each other. Said one of them, "How long have we been here?" They said, "We have stayed perhaps, a day, or part of a day." But in the end they all decided, "God alone knows how long we've been sleeping in this cave..."

Miri skimmed a few verses down, reading the part she'd been looking for all along, "And they'd stayed in their cave for three hundred years, some say nine more."

At this point, Peter the Rabbit looked at Miri with an idea, "Did you know Mister Spock thinks our planet is only a hundred sixty years old?"

"He may be right. Remember all that business a few years ago about the second moon?"

"My dad said that was a miracle. The moon split in half..."

"But they were both complete moons. Totally round. How could that just _happen_ like that?"

"God works in mysterious w-"

"We're on a space ship, Peter. Be serious."

Peter the Rabbit groaned, "How should I know? I've just finally figured out how to _use_ this stupid computer."

"Never mind..." the thought was still bothering her, though. At the risk of trying her friend's already strained patience, she asked, "Peter, what if... you know, the things we remember from way long ago, before the mutations started... what if none of those things actually happened?"

He looked up at her for a moment, processed the question carefully. Then failing that completely, he asked, "Huh?

An electronic chirp from Miri's communicator put this tortured conversation out of its misery. She answered it as promptly as she'd been taught to, and immediately heard Lieutenant Uhura's voice ordering, _"Ensign Hallab, report to Transporter Room One. Bring your field jacket and hand phaser."_

Miri flinched, "Lieutenant, I haven't been issued a field jacket. _Or_ a phaser."

_"See the Quartermaster on the way there. Compartment One Oh Four, Deck Five."_

"I'm on my way. Hallab out." snapping the communicator shut, Miri leaned down and patted Peter the Rabbit on the shoulder.

"Hey Miri," he said, responding to her touch, "Do you ever get this feeling... like... like there's something _really_ important we were supposed to remember?"

"All the time." She marched right out of his cabin - pausing, naturally, to disarm the small antipersonnel bomb mounted to the door - and then greeted the guards in the corridor on her way to the turbolift. The Onlies could hold down the fort while she was gone, she'd taught them well and prepared them even better. Some of them, she knew in the back of her mind, were uniquely qualified for the job, trustworthy in ways that went beyond their abilities or even their experiences. Trustworthy in ways that Starfleet was trustworthy.

"Are they _really_ just dreams?" she wondered as the turbolift quickly deposited her in the corridor near the Enterprise's quartermaster. For the millionth time, she dismissed it as just a fantasy or a half-remembered book from somewhere; fiction, certainly, nothing more. Even if the Americans _did_ have a space ship named Calypso, she was the last person in the world they would ever let near it.


	13. Chapter 13

**ARTIFACT**

Doppelgänger Orbit  
USS Enterprise (NCC-1701)  
Stardate 2261.3.4

- 1925 hours -

Ensign Rand was already waiting for them in the transporter room, already in a field jacket, mid way into adjusting the settings on her phaser and the targeting scope on her monocle. She'd taken Spock's advice and brought her issued side arm this time and was feeling especially pleased with herself, to the extreme chagrin of Ensign Dallas and Security Chief McCahil who both arrived only seconds ahead of the Captain and science officer, still bleary eyed from an impromptu cat nap.

Miri arrived last, struggling into a field jacket that had been issued to her by the quarter master literally minutes earlier. She looked as comfortable in a Starfleet uniform as she ever did in the dingy rags she'd been wearing when Enterprise found her. She looked excited, yet explosively nervous. So much like a raw cadet on a first assignment. "Ensign," Kirk said, her voice snapping her immediately to attention, "Are you checked out on the EM-102 combat phaser?"

Miri shook her head, slightly nervous. "No, Sir. Just the hand phaser, but I haven't been issued one yet."

"Now's a good time to learn. So here's the situation," and he addressed this as much to the rest of the landing party as to Miri, "There's a Gorn capsule heading for Southern England, and I want to have a look to see what they're after. I don't want to be there when they arrive, so this is a quick look, in and out. Miri, since you have more experience with this planet than anyone else, you'll come along as our resident expert."

"I... uh... Sir," Miri shrank a little, "I've never actually _been_ to England."

"Neither have I." Kirk strode to the equipment locker and snatched out three tricorders, handing one of each to Spock and Miri. Life support belts came next, again one for each of them, and Kirk said, "You know about these, right?"

Miri nodded, "The life support belt. Makes you invincible."

"Hardly _invincible_, Ensign. The overshield adheres to the boundary layer of a conductive surface, namely your skin and some of your equipment. It reacts to any sudden change in local energy density, like as a radiation surge or a bullet, and instantly expands to provide protection. The power cells can only sustain the field for a few minutes at a time, and the more strain you put on it faster they drain. When you hear a low-pitched beeping, it means the shield's dead and you're vulnerable."

"Got it. So, what if-" her next question was already being answered as Kirk recovered a phaser rifle from the rack and presented it to Miri with both hands, "Ooh!"

"It handles a lot like the hand phasers," Kirk said, handing it over to her, "There's a bit more recoil, but it can handle a longer duty cycle so you can sweep with the beam if you need to. Default is for the stun setting, but remember that won't render complete unconsciousness unless you get a headshot or a longer contact in the center of mass."

Miri took this all in and then nodded. Since to her it was basically a death ray, all of these things seemed immediately intuitive. Obviously, this weapon could be programmed to do all kinds of different things to her enemies in all kinds of different ways, but the Captain had intentionally locked it onto its easiest-to-use setting because he didn't want her fiddling with the advanced settings she wasn't trained for. Which, more or less, was exactly what Gideon did when he first taught her how to shoot... "Is there a safety switch?" she asked, suddenly remembering her first lesson from way back then.

Kirk smiled, "The phaser knows if an authorized user is holding it. It will not fire - ever - unless _you_ pull the trigger."

"Sounds simple enough," although she suspected it wouldn't be. Miri reflected that unlike her fellow survivors, her Starfleet companions were totally unfamiliar with her home planet and the strange things that had been happening to it over the years (to the extent it was possible to be familiar with them at all). She could always count on the Onlies to know what to do if things went seriously sideways; with Starfleet, she wasn't so sure.

"I want you on the lookout for reavers," he told her, "The tricorder has a range of about five kilometers, but you should use the rifle's scope for visual inspections too."

"Yes, Captain... One question. In the unlikely event I have to change from the stun setting...?"

"The selector on the right side above the trigger guard. Power levels are on back, above the cheek rest."

"Right..." and Miri found the appropriate controls on the side of the rifle and checked herself to make sure it was indeed set to stun, and checked the power level to make sure it was up to maximum.

Kirk grinned, "Don't trust me, is that it?"

Miri shrugged, slightly embarassed, "Gideon told me once, 'Never ever fire a weapon you haven't checked yourself.'"

Spock admired her diligence, but not her tact. "Phasers are not firearms, Ensign, and they operate at such a level of complexity that their maintenance and upkeep are the exclusive responsibility of trained engineers."

"Yes, Sir. I'll try to remember that."

"Chief," Kirk looked to the transporter technicians, now that his team was basically assembled, "do you have a fix on the Gorn capsule's landing site?"

"Just got it from Ensign Chekov, Sir. And get this: if they don't make any course corrections, their landing site is within five kilometers of Stonehenge."

"Really?"

"Always wanted to go there," Ensign Rand said.

"No time like the present." Kirk shot her a big obnoxious toothy grin and instructed the technicians, "Set us down... let's say, fifty meters south of the monument. It's a good concealed location, we'll use it as a beamout site."

"Aye, Sir."

Doctor McCoy came through the hatch now, wearing a medikit on his shoulder and a scowl on his face. "Jim, what the hell kinda-"

"The Gorn are headed for England. We're just gonna pop in and take a look before they get there. Who knows? They might know something we don't."

"Maybe they're just going down to collect centipedes or something?"

Spock said as he stepped onto the transporter pad, "So far we have yet to land an away team on the British islands. At the very least this will allow for a more thorough report."

"Sure beats Gaza, anyway," Rand said, stepping up behind him. Kirk followed next, and the two bleary eyed security officers last of all.

McCoy took in the enthusiasm of the three, then the apparent lethargy of the other two. His hesitation tripled on the spot. "Dallas, McCahil, you two look half asleep."

"We're fine, Doctor. Let's just get this over with."

McCoy sighed and stepped onto the pad with them. Since the transporter only had six pads, he squeezed into a space next to their youngest member and patted her reassuringly on the shoulder, "How you feeling Miri?"

"Nervous, Sir."

"Scared?"

"No, Sir. Just been a long time since I've worked with grups."

McCoy raised a brow.

"Grownups, I mean. Adults."

McCoy growled, "_What_ adults?"

Once the Doctor was finally situated, Kirk ordered, "Energize," and McCoy clenched his teeth, closed his eyes and waited with shrill terror to be dismantled molecule by molecule and fired across space like a human particle beam. He began to feel the tingle of the phase coils buzzing through his skin, crackling behind his eyes, inverting his ear canals and dropping his scalp into his liver...

"There it is," Kirk said just in front of him, and McCoy opened his eyes to discover that he had already materialized on the planet's surface before he had ever felt the first of these sensations. "Wait a minute..."

"Is _that_ it?" Rand asked in complete puzzlement.

Miri looked in that direction and nodded, "I recognize it from the almanacs. That's it alright."

Spock snapped open his tricorder and started scanning intensely. He didn't even need to say it, the word "fascinating" was printed on his face like the registry on Enterprise's hull. "That," Spock said, "is _not_ the stonehenge of Earth."

What it _was _- as they all saw to their complete disbelief - was an enormous obelisk some ten meters high, mounted on a tall platform like a stage or shrine. Spock's tricorder showed him that it was in the exact latitude and longitude in which the Stonehenge monument _should_ have been, and yet his immediate readings had a spectral pattern that told him the monument was _not_ manmade, nor was it even made of stone.

"What do you make of that, Spock?"

"Unknown, Captain. It corresponds to nothing in the Earth archeological catalog."

"What about alien artifacts?"

Spock adjusted the reference mode on the tricorder and tied it directly into Enterprise' library computer. In a few moments, he had his answer, "No known alien architecture on file."

Miri looked at them puzzled. Her first instinct was to ask whether or not the obelisk had been made by humans... but then she remembered, this entire planet - including her - was actually artificial anyway, which lead to the question, "Could it have been made by _my_ people?"

Kirk started at the question, "Could it?"

"Well, it could have been constructed by whoever made my planet, right? On the other hand, if it's older than the rest of the planet, it could be something indigenous to... well... whatever this planet was before it changed."

"True... and this _does_ seem to be the Gorn's destination," Kirk said, and started walking towards the obelisk. Miri was right. If it wasn't created by the force that duplicated this planet, it could easily be a surviving artifact from whatever this planet was transformed _from_. That would make it a valuable point of reference to trace the true age of this world; the Gorn wouldn't be interested in it otherwise. "Rand, McCahil, take up positions one hundred meters to the east and west. Dallas, Miri, you're with us."

Rand and McCahil started on an angle, both in opposite directions wide of the obelisk. Kirk, meanwhile, led the rest of the team to the shadow of the object and spread out to all sides of it while Spock squatted at the base. He unpacked the field science kit with one hand and kept his tricorder trained on it with the other. Kirk, meanwhile, flipped open his communicator and checked the timer: the Gorn capsule would make planetfall in another fifty two minutes.

Spock made the best of his time. First thing's first, he set his tricorder to an ultrasound mode and set the device to map the entire surface of the monument down to nanometer resolution. The tricorder could do this on its own, so he set it down facing the obelisk and unpacked the rest of his gear.

"Need a hand, Spock?" McCoy set the medical kit down and squatted next to the science gear. Spock nodded a welcome, and McCoy added two more hands to the process.

Two minutes later the scan cycle was finished. McCoy collected a core drill from the kit while Spock set the tricorder to a EM-scan mode, modulated pulses of ground and metal-penetrating radar. The scan image from the inside of the object came back completely blank, as if only the outermost surface of the monument even existed. After an ultrasound sweep turned back the same blank results, Spock reported, "I am unable to scan the interior of the object."

McCoy started up the core drill and stared down the eyepiece, focussing on a tiny section of the corner of the platform. A narrow force beam snapped out from the end of the drill, sliced into the surface of the material a few nanometers thick and then deposited those samples inside of a sealed plastic slide for examination later. He pulled the slide out of the drill and slipped it into a container in the science kit before starting up the steps to the obelisk itself. Then he looked back at the specimen container and marveled: the thin film of dusty grains on the slide sparkled like a lightning storm in miniature and then vanished. "Whatever it's made of, I can't get a good sample of it. The material just disintegrates into nothing."

"It isn't _material_ at all," Spock said, squinting at his tricorder screen, "Trace analysis is picking up ozone anomalies and ion distribution. Resonance scan reads it as a type of electrically charged phased-matter, similar to the quantum resonators in Suliban cloaking devices."

"Suliban technology?" McCoy shook his head in wonder, "That's a _long_ way off."

"The similarity is noteworthy, but not necessarily meaningful. It also has a superficial similarity to our own defensive force fields, but vastly more coherent."

"Holograms," Kirk said, noticing a trend in this analysis, "Or something like it."

"Far more substantial than what we would call a hologram, Captain. But, again, similar in principle." Spock set the tricorder down and unfolded from the science kit a large telescoping device shaped like a crossbow with a tripod section on the base of it. He arranged it with the arms perpendicular to the obelisk and then set the device active. Everyone - even Rand and McCahil in the distance - felt a slight vibration in the ground as the device emitted a series of powerful gravity waves and measured the reaction from the obelisk. Spock picked up the tricorder again and set it to "node" mode, and the instrument results appeared on its screen, "Fascinating!"

Kirk had known Spock just long enough to be able to tell when his science officer had discovered something valuable. He bounded down from the platform and knelt down next to him, silently awaiting a report.

"The platform here seems to extend deep below the surface, far beyond the range of our sensor equipment. It seems to extend at least as deep as the mantle, possibly all the way to the planet's core."

Kirk looked at the platform now totally awestruck. This was just the tip of one mind-numbingly huge ice berg after all. "Mass reading?"

"Strictly speaking, a phased-matter structure of this type is characterized by a relative lack of mass, although I estimate potential energies equivalent to some two hundred and forty kilograms."

"Can you get an indication of the overall shape?"

Spock frowned, "Gravitational sensors are not that precise. However, based on ground-penetrating radar to a depth of two hundred meters, I estimate the platform is the top of an extremely long isosceles pyramid... judging by the angle, the apex of which is at a depth of some six thousand three hundred and twenty kilometers, give or take twenty kilometers."

All the way to the core, Kirk realized. He suddenly had a premonition of some alien creature manifesting a steering wheel on the side of the obelisk and piloting this planet through the cosmos like a giant yacht.

"This obelisk looks different from the platform. Maybe a real substance to this one," McCoy said from his spot at the top of the platform, "the samples don't disintegrate."

Spock held up his tricorder and scanned it himself, "There is a slight energy reaction... it seems to be metallic, but my scans are not reflecting back."

"So there's no way of knowing what's inside it?" Kirk asked.

"The core drill is able to penetrate the surface, Captain, so it may be possible to cut _through_ it."

Kirk shook his head, "I don't want to resort to that yet. For all we know this could be some kind of... burial ground, or something."

Spock raised a brow, "A force-barrier tomb powered by geothermal energy?"

"Geothermal?"

"I can think of little other reason for the extreme depth of the object, Captain. It is probably drawing energy directly from the action of the planet's core, using either a dilithium matrix or some type of thermocouple. That may also be sustaining its existence, as a forcefield of this coherence and complexity would obviously require a tremendous power source."

Ensign Dallas said, "I didn't know you could use dilithium in a geothermal generator..."

"Dilithium crystals are well valued for their energy conversion properties," Spock cut him off, "in particular, its capacity to regulate the conversion of antiparticles in high-energy conditions. The high temperature and magnetic potentials of the deep mantle may suffice for that."

"You think there could be a warp reactor somewhere inside this thing?" McCoy asked, suddenly very unhappy to find himself still standing on it.

"Perhaps, Doctor. Assuming it _does_ extend as far as the planet's core, this device may be capable of force outputs in the thousands of isotons."

McCoy carefully stepped down from the platform and placed the core drill back in the science kit.

Spock, meanwhile, unpacked a large flat device wit a single-leg stand facing the obelisk and set it to ran scans. A hair thin line of green light swept the structure from base to tip, several times in a row, slowly at first and then a series of rapid sweeps. Spock read the data off his tricorder, then frowned in disappointment, "Microscopic DNA scans show no anomalies, indigenous life only."

"Meaning there's no trace of the aliens who put this thing here."

Spock nodded.

"You know, we might be able to get a good look at the root of this ting, maybe see how deep it g-" Kirk's words were drowned out by a series of high pitched chirps from a phaser rifle a few meters away. He dropped into the grass and looked up to see Miri drawing a bead on something close to the horizon, something at which she was now firing a series of very carefully aimed two-round bursts as if she was trying to carve a sculpture with her phaser. Which was somewhat worrisome, now that Kirk thought about it; Miri was an excellent marksman who normally wouldn't need more than one shot to hit a single target. That she was still firing now suggested... "Reavers?" he asked, coming back to his feet.

"No..." she stopped firing now, but kept one eye glued to the phaser's aim sight, "Maybe. I'm not sure..."

"What does it look like?"

"I don't know. I'm not even sure it was really there. It was just a shadow..."

Spock held up his tricorder and started to scan.

Kirk walked over to her side, where the Ensign-in-training was still drawing a bead on something with her phaser rifle. "Miri, I know you're nervous but..."

"I'm _sure_ I hit one. The others are staying low," she said, panning back and forth with her phaser and closing her other eye. The rifle's targeting sensor was her only view of the world now, whatever it was she was looking at, "I don't think they're reavers. They're moving too slowly."

"What do they look like?"

She squinted through the eyepiece, but shook her head. "It's _shaped_ like a person, but it's... well, _transparent_. It's like a mirage or something."

Kirk looked over his shoulder at Spock. The Vulcan was scowling at the tricorder readings. "Whatever it is, it does not fully register on my tricorder. But it _is_ there. Moving away from us at a rate of zero point seven meters per second, approximately eight hundred meters away."

Now the Captain looked at her in surprise, "How did you even _see_ it at this distance?"

"I was looking for Reavers, Sir, scanning the horizon. I saw... _something_ in the brush, and I fired at it. I hit one, the others dropped into the grass."

"Indeterminate life form readings. And an anomaly in the ultra-violet range..." Spock put away his tricorder and brooded, "It appears we are being watched, Captain."

"Some Gorn scouts have used optical camouflage. Could this be them?"

"Doubtful, Captain. The Gorn camouflage technique was largely biochemical, similar to Suliban adaptations. This pattern... almost reminds me of-"

Any further speculation was brought to an abrupt end by an explosion overhead, a single monstrous thunderclap of a sonic boom as something passed through the atmosphere at a fantastic rate of speed. Kirk saw the source of it almost before he had time to ponder the implications, falling out of the sky like a fireball from the heavens, so bright it almost outshined the sun. "What in...?"

"The Gorn capsule, Captain. Nearly half an hour ahead of schedule," Spock already had his tricorder out again and aimed directly at it, shielding his eyes with his free hand, "Fascinating... It's using a force field as an aeroshell, vastly increasing its drag coefficient. It will descend to this vicinity within fifteen minutes."

"Pack it up, Spock," Kirk said as he whipped out his communicator, "Rand, McCahil, get over here on the double! We're beaming out!"

_"Yes Sir!"_

_"Aye Sir!"_

Spock and McCoy collapsed and re-stowed the science equipment in the kit, not quite as neatly as regulation but enough to close the box and take it with them at least. That accomplished, Kirk waited a handful of seconds for Rand and McCahil to catch up, then keyed up Enterprise's frequency and called to the ship. "Kirk to Enterprise, standby for transport."

His response - somehow unsurprisingly - was a hiss of static through which Uhura's voice barely penetrated, _"Standby, away team. That capsule's reentry is putting out alot of radiation, we're having to reposition to get a lock."_

"I was afraid of that..." actually, this was the very reason Kirk had wanted to use Stonehenge as a beamout site, hoping that the natural cover of the monument would conceal them if the reentry plume disrupted the ship's line of sight. The _non-existence_ of the henge had caught him so off guard that he'd almost forgotten about the need for cover. "Tall grass nearby," he said, gesturing to the field around them, "we'll move out two hundred meters and lay low. Miri, you keep an eye on that whatever-it-is out there. Move out!" Kirk lead by example, of course, sprinting off due east in the opposite direction of the whatever-it-was that Miri had fired at. The rest of the team followed in his heels, not quite in a sprint but fast enough to keep the Captain in sight so they would at least know when to stop and gather around him.


	14. Chapter 14

**GUNBENDER**

Doppelgänger, Southern England

Stardate 2261.3.4

- 1950 hours -

The sound of engine noise boiled to a groan as the capsule descended, rising to a howl just before touchdown, then fading to a distant hum once the craft finally planted its landing struts in the grass some fifty meters away from the obelisk. It didn't sound like an old-Earth combustion engine, but it wasn't quite an impulse engine either. It was a noisy, oscillating sound, something that reminded Kirk of the pulse-detonation engines on WW-III cruise missiles. It was an almost human-like design: a flattened teardrop shape that, now that it was safely situated on the ground, open like a clamshell on one entire side that exposed the glowing innards of what was clearly some kind of high-capacity transport chamber.

Kirk stopped in his tracks and turned here, squatted in the tall grass where he could still see with his own eyes. It wasn't quite two hundred meters, but if the Gorn were here for this obelisk - and they certainly appeared to be - it was more than far enough.

The transporter chamber came ablaze with sparkling orange light, and then several moving figures materialized there, hauling equipment packs and sensor devices as they scattered around the site. Scale was had to judge at this distance but he knew from Sulu's report that the Runner stood just shy of five feet tall even accounting for his long flexible neck. These Gorn weren't much larger: biped reptiles about the size of human pre-teens. They all seemed to be wearing some type of uniform, except for the first two off the craft, who were wearing heavy body armor and were armed with plasma weapons. They all walked with an almost simeon posture, their legs never quite straight, yet they moved with a kind of artful grace and casualness, the way a diver might move through water.

In their previous encounters with the Gorn they had encountered a number of subtypes of the species, ranging in intelligence and sophistication from semi-feral berserkers to sublimely intelligent and frighteningly strong command types. Though it was hard to tell from looking, these Gorn seemed to lack a distinct characteristic from any particular type and seemed to be an amalgamation of all of them; small as they were, they stood mostly upright and every single one of them wore a uniform and a full pack of field equipment. A few of the larger ones also carried plasma weapons and some tactical equipment, but the difference in size was subtle, closer to the difference between McCahil and Miri than a human and a Gorn.

It was theorized that these Gorn were a different faction than the groups Enterprise had encountered before; that theory was looking more and more likely by the second.

Spock kept his attention glued to the tricorder, while Rand and McCahil squinted through their monocles. "Phasers safe," Kirk reminded them, fearing an itchy trigger finger might accidentally turn surveillance into a shooting match. Both of them obeyed, as did Miri, though her attention seemed to be less on the Gorn and more on the mysterious 'something' that had caught her attention earlier.

His communicator beeped again and Kirk answered it quietly, "Kirk here."

_"We're in position, Captain. Standby for beamout..."_

"Hold on that for a moment, and keep this channel open. Energize on my signal."

_"Aye Captain... but sir, changing our position means we've dropped into a much lower orbit. The transport window closes in four minutes and won't reopen again for another forty five."_

"Understood, Enterprise. We'll keep you posted."

Spock touched Kirk's shoulder, radiating concern out of every pore.

"They took the time to observe our mission," Kirk said, "It's only fair we take the time to observe theirs. Besides, I don't want to risk being outdone by our invisible friends out there." For the time being, he kept an open communications line to the Enterprise, ready to give the order to beam out at a moment's notice. If he waited too long, the transporters would have to extract the away team under fire and the six of them would be trapped in a combat beamout situation. If he beamed out too early... well, that ran the relatively small risk of not seeing exactly what the Gorn were up to. It almost wasn't worth the risk when he thought about it, but then, curiosity _was_ a heinous virtue of starship captains...

For nearly half an hour, the Gorn moved around the monument, unpacking equipment from antigrav cases in a manner not unlike Spock and McCoy earlier. Spock could identify Gorn versions of a few basic devices - gravity sensors, ultrasound probes, life form scanners and a few others - along with a few whose purpose he couldn't begin to guess. Several attached some elaborate-looking devices to the surface of the platform which - once activated - were flung away from it as if propelled by explosives.

"Electron resonance probes," Spock said, carefully scanning the failed devices as the startled Gorn scrambled to retrieve them, "They're attempting to determine the shape of the object by inducing an electric current on its skin. Intriguing methodology. Futile, though, in light of the composition of the platform."

Actually, they seemed to have better luck attaching similar devices to the obelisk on top of the platform. Kirk briefly wondered if this method would be more effective than Spock's failed attempt to scan inside it. Even if it was, he doubted there was anything useful inside the monument that would give them clues as to the origins of this planet; the monument was much too conspicuous for that.

After what seemed like a long, tense delay, one of the Gorn approached the obelisk with a stubby cylindrical object in hand, looked along its surface for a moment, then found a corner section of it and pressed the cylinder against it. Kirk saw the violet snap of a force beam and realized this was some kind of core drill, pulling samples out of the surface layer and encasing them in a slide or capsule for later analysis. So far, the Gorn were exactly replicating Starfleet's examination procedures except for their seemingly greater preparedness...

Then the tip of the obelisk flickered and a lance of orange flame snapped out from the tip, right down over the head of the Gorn with the core drill. The beam swept through the long axis of the hapless creature and carved a six-inch section out of him, neatly splitting him in two from head to groin. The bisected Gorn collapsed into a heap, then the beam swept out a circle around the perimeter of the platform as the remainder of the Gorn team scrambled for cover.

The beam stopped as quickly as it started. Spock looked up from his tricorder now with an almost gleeful expression. "Fascinating! Tricorder indicates a power output in the thousands of megawatts..."

"I'm more interested in the trigger, Spock. Am I crazy or did that thing just react to the core drill?"

Spock nodded slowly, "It is fortuitous that Doctor McCoy took it upon himself to take that sample. This device appears to be programmed to defend itself against any non-human aggression."

"Probably to avoid accidentally blowing up inquisitive locals..."

"Indeed."

"Meaning _we_ can take samples," Kirk decided, "But the Gorn can't."

Spock nodded again. "That would seem to be the logical assumption, Captain."

Kirk came to a decision all at once. He slipped off his phaser and his tricorder and quickly recovered the core drill from Spock's field kit before the science officer even realized what he was up to. McCoy reached over with a cautionary gesture, but much too late; the Captain was already to his feet and marching through the overgrown grass towards the landing site, where a dozen Gorn were still cowering behind the hull of their capsule or any other rock big enough to conceal them. They didn't need to be told, but Rand, Dallas and McCahil all trained their phasers on the Gorn camp, not so much to prevent a hostile action as to be able to respond in the event that the Gorn found the Captain's actions as incomprehensible as his own away team.

With most of their attention on the obelisk, the Gorn didn't notice him until he was almost forty meters away. They found his arrival almost as perplexing as the force beam that had torn through their numbers a minute ago, but much easier to deal with since - at the very least - a humanoid life form wasn't completely outside the realm of their experience. Kirk approached with both arms in the air, core drill in hand, so the Gorn could see he wasn't approaching in a fighting posture or with any overtly aggressive intentions. Even so, three of them partially emerged from concealment, each brandishing small handheld weapons that looked like techno-art sculptures of dinosaur skulls. Kirk hesitated for a moment, wondering about the alien weapons. The plasma rifles he understood, but the skull-guns were an odd design even by Gorn standards. He suspected they were a lot more intimidating than they were dangerous.

When the Gorn didn't cut him down where he stood, Kirk picked up his pace and walked directly to the obelisk. This both put the Gorn at ease - at least on his account - and frightened them back into hiding as they became convinced that another force beam attack was about to vaporize their human counterpart. Before they could get more nervous, Kirk walked to the same spot where McCoy had taken an earlier sample, set the drill against a corner of the platform and let its tiny sampling beam scrape a few microns off the surface of the structure. Then he stepped up to the obelisk and did the same, collected both samples into separate slides, and very carefully set the slides and the drill down on the top of the platform and walked away from it.

When the obelisk failed to slice him in half, the Gorn emerged from concealment again, watched and waited. When another minute passed with no activity, one of the skull-gunners carefully approached Kirk while his companion bounded up the steps to collect the drill and the sample slides. Seeing - and perhaps for the first time, realizing - what they were, he looked back to the capsule where his companions were still cowering and fired off a long and complicated series of musical whistles that Kirk's translator eventually rendered as _"The transmitter is programmed to permit human examination only."_

Kirk picked up on this and asked, "Transmitter?"

The closer one with the skull-gun in its hand, though no longer raising the gun as if to blast him with it, sang out a long composition that translated to, _"This object here, we've identified it as some kind of long range communication device. It has seen to resonate at three specific subspace frequencies."_

"My science officer thinks this device might be powered by geothermal energy. Maybe using a dilithium lattice for thermal conversion."

_"Geothermal power transformation... but the device would have to extend many thousands of kilometers down."_

Kirk nodded, "According to our readings, it _does_."

_"Fascinating!"_

Kirk smiled. "This device seems to have a defensive program in place. It may misinterpret your analysis as a hostile act."

The Gorn nodded, apparently come to the same conclusion on its own.

"You may have guessed by now that this object wasn't created by the inhabitants of this planet."

_"We have suspected this. The transmitter is not consistent with indigenous technology. We do not know where this came from."_

"Let's work together to find out," Kirk went on, seizing what seemed to be a brief rapport with his Gorn counterpart, "You know I've made this offer to your ship before, and now I'm making it in person. If we combine our resources, we can help each other to solve the mystery of this planet."

_"That is a wonderful idea..."_ the Gorn stared at him for a moment, _"Who are you?"_

"I'm James T. Kirk, Captain of the Federation starship Enterprise."

_"I am Seventh and First Cycle the Gunbender. I am chief inspector of the Gorn starship Francium."_

"It's in our mutual best interest that we cooperate on this mission. We're stronger together than apart."

_"Oh, I fully agree with you, James T. Kirk. But the decision is not mine to make."_

"Whose decision is it?"

_"The orbit commander at this time is Second and Twentyfirst Cycle the Dancer. He tends to make decisions that are not in _anyone's_ best interest."_

"Is there someone else up there we can talk to? Someone more open to a cultural exchange?"

_"Our navigation commander, Eighth and Fifteenth Cycle the Boneless. She is far more reasonable, and is more flexible in her interpretation of our instructions."_

"Instructions?"

The Gunbender lowered his head and tilted it horizontal, what Sulu had determined was their equivalent of a nod, _"From our harbor. We have been instructed to avoid contact with your species and to collect information about this planet and its technology. The harbor was not more specific than that. Eighth and Fifteenth is open to cooperation if it is necessary, but for some reason Second and Twentyfirst interprets these instructions as an order to prevent _you_ from getting that same information. It is a source of some controversy among my colleagues."_

"What about your Captain?"

The Gunbender lowered his head slightly and narrowed his eyes. Somehow, Kirk recognized this as puzzlement. _"I don't understand that question."_

"Um... who has highest authority on your ship?"

Gunbender stared for a moment and pondered the question. Then he came to a realization and said, _"Each watch is a team, each watch has authority. We do not dispute between watches."_

"You have no single commander who oversees the entire mission?"

_"Yes. Our ship performs multiple missions. Orbit mission is commanded by Second and Twentyfirst. Navigation between planets and stars is for Eighth and Fifteenth."_

Kirk thought about this for a moment, then nodded, "You're saying you have different commanders for each mission phase."

_"Yes..."_ The Gorn seemed unsure about his end of the translation, but it seemed close enough to his own understanding. _"Yes, different commanders."_

"That may be a problem."

_"It may be a problem. Yes. Cooperation is unlikely while we are in orbit of this planet. And while we are on the subject,_" the Gorn craned its head almost one hundred and eighty degrees, back towards the reentry capsule where another Gorn was in a low crouch position, having a very animated conversation with its ankle bracelet in that rumbling/musical language of theirs, _"My team leader,"_ the Gunbender gestured to this one,_ "must now make a report to the Francium. If I know Second and Twentyfirst, the new instructions regarding your people will not be pleasant."_

"Perhaps if you let me explain to your commander..."

The transporter chamber began to hum. _"Go. You do not have much time."_

"But..."

_"Go!"_

Sighing, Kirk turned and started jogging back towards the landing party, reaching for his communicator as he did. Behind him, the Gorn likewise jogged over to his team leader, already in conversation with their command ship above. There came from the two of them a brief but frantic exchange of vocalizations, almost certainly a heated argument. A few seconds of gesticulating and elevated voices culminated into a sweeping gesture by the leader, followed in short order by a change in posture from almost the entire Gorn away team. The transport chamber glowed furiously, and then the size of the Gorn team doubled as the new arrivals took their positions. All of them - even the one Kirk knew as "the Gunbender" - made a check of their weapons, pulling mechanical leavers and handles as if to load physical projectiles. Kirk doubled his pace and broke into a run.

It all happened at once, too quickly for him to register and too abruptly for him to anticipate let alone understand it. There was a series of loud popping sounds like firecrackers going off, followed immediately by a blunt impact and a blast of heat against the backs of his legs as if he'd just been hit by a speeding car. He hit the ground sideways on his elbow, scrambled back to his feet and went on running, feeling the hot pins-and-needles sensation of his overshield cycling down. Despite both sides' reluctance, he knew they were in a fight now; what he didn't know, even as he finally reached Rand and McCahil's positions, was what exactly the Gorn had fired at him that could have hit with the force of a hand grenade.

The three security officers had started firing their phasers in bursts when Kirk slid into the grass in front of them. Spock was glued to his tricorder screen while McCoy was bitterly growling obscenities under his breath. Only at this point he noticed the phaser beams were the fiery orange of a high material-disruptor setting instead of the blue-violet pulses of the stun pulse. "Keep your phasers on _stun_," Kirk said, "they're not heavily armed, and they're reluctant to fight with us..."

"The latter may be true, Captain," Spock said tersely, "But they _are_ quite heavily armed..." as he spoke, Kirk heard more gunshots from the Gorn camp and looked back in that direction as several large, brightly-glowing objects hurtled towards them, like photon torpedoes in miniature, flying in flat arcs out of the "mouths" of the skull-guns like fast-pitch baseballs. It took Kirk half an instant to work out the landing sites of those projectiles and then he turned and dove in the opposite direction, seconds before a chain of explosions ripped open the ground just short of where he'd been standing.

He chided himself for not seeing this sooner. It was the basic components of a photon torpedo launcher, miniaturized in hand-held form. These Gorn were _undeniably_ smarter than their counterparts. "Enterprise, away team! Require combat beamout immediately!"

_"Standby, away team. We're coming around in our orbit again. Transport window opens in two minutes, twenty seconds."_

Ensign Dallas brought up his phaser rifle and swept the beam across the Gorn lines like a flashlight. The reptilian soldiers dove into the grass, some of them firing randomly with plasma rifles in a token attempt at an answer. One of the Gorn took a phaser beam directly across his chest; a circle of translucent material seemed to appear directly in front of him and the phaser beam crashed against it, driving both the shield and the Gorn behind it backwards into the tall grass as if they'd been hit with a fire hose. _They have shields too,_ Kirk realized. That also explained why Spock had taken his phaser off stun.

Kirk took advantage of the covering fire, retrieved his own phaser, set it for kill. Without a targeting sensor he had to walk the guide beam across the landscape and dance through the grasses in the field until he saw the little blue dot skitter across the chest of one of the giant lizards. When he squeezed the trigger, a shimmering line of orange flame shot from the emitter and struck the Gorn in in the side of its head; as before, a circle of translucent material appeared in the path of the beam, but the force of the phaser blasted knocked the hapless creature completely off his feet and flipped him end-over-end as if he'd been hit by a runaway car.

Kirk looked for other targets, but more of the mini-torpedoes were being fired into the air, these on much more random headings than the others as the Gorn landing party was now more concerned with staying in cover than killing their opponents. Which was, for Kirk, a considerable problem; he figured out that it wasn't necessary to stun the entire Gorn party, just any member of the party who might have outranked the Gunbender.

"The guidance systems on those grenades are unsophisticated, Captain," Spock said reassuringly, "Simple ballistic trajectories calculated automatically to land at a pre-arranged target. No midcourse guidance."

"Like field artillery. But they don't even have to hit us to score a kill."

"The grenades produce temperatures in excess of four thousand kelvins," Spock looked up from his tricorder, "Our shields may withstand one, possibly two direct hits."

"Can you jam their scanners? Keep them from tracking us?"

"I'll try, Captain..." Spock started adjusting the controls on his tricorder, toggling through scan modes into the tactical operations menu that - both of them knew - would allow the tricorder to operate as an ECM device. Whatever the Gorn equivalent of a tricorder was, it was about to get an ear full of mind-crushing white noise.

"Let's put on some distance first," Kirk said, and then shouted to the others, "We're gonna leapfrog it. Bones, Miri, Dallas and McCahil pull back first, Spock and Rand with me. Fall back twenty meters then reposition. Ready?"

"Ready," shouted Dallas and McCahil, and McCoy grumbled something sarcastic and depressing.

Kirk counted in his head, then shouted "Go!" and raised up in the grass high enough to fire off series of sweeping beams from his hand phaser, joined after the shortest delay by Miri and Rand. McCahil's group turned and broke into a run in the opposite direction, as fast as they could without raising their heads high enough to give the Gorn a clear target.

Two Gorn emerged from cover, raising skull guns and aiming more carefully than the others and fired a salvo of those burning orange grenades into the air. A flurry of phaser fire from Rand and Miri slammed of them into the ground like a traffic accident and sent two others scrambling back for cover. The grenades they launched sailed high into the air, spiraled down towards the Earth and then landed in a ragged cluster directly in the path of McCahil's group in rolling sheet of explosions. Dallas and Doctor McCoy dodged explosions like frightened cats dodging hailstones. McCahil, for no obvious reason, stopped in his tracks, turned and fired his phaser up in the air as if trying to shoot down the grenades. One of the little fireballs came down right in front of him and detonated between his feet; the explosion launched him twenty feet into the air and flipped him five times before he landed on his head few meters away, most of his uniform already on fire.

A group they hadn't noticed until now opened fire from a different direction, plasma bolts cut through the air over and between them and sent all four of them diving back into the grass for cover. Kirk glanced just as a plasma bolt hit Ensign Rand in the stomach like an errant fastball, doubling her over as it knocked her off her feet. He fired blind at where he thought the shot had come from and jumped to her side to inspect the wound; her field jacket was scorched and blackened where the plasma bolt had breached her overshield, but the skin underneath was barely singed. He pulled her up to a kneeling position; she nodded an 'I'll be fine' gesture and took up her phaser again. Kirk knew, though, that if she took another hit like that they'd be recovering her remains with a shovel.

"They're flanking us, Captain," Spock said, squinting at his tricorder screen.

Kirk looked back at where McCahil's team had run and saw them drop to a new position almost thirty meters behind them in the wild grass. It was, in fact, a precarious position; off to one side, the wild grass tapered off to shorter growth that would provide almost no cover at all, and off to the other side, the grass ended abruptly at the crumbling remnants of an acceleratedly-ancient road. It made a relatively straight retreat path, on the one hand, but it meant the Gorn would have almost no difficulty figuring out which way they went.

No choice either way. "We're gonna fall back next," Kirk said to the others. He wanted until Miri and Dallas had their new position, then thundered, "Go!" and shoved Rand to her feet ahead of him. All four of them sprinted back towards their new position while Miri and Dallas fired swept their phaser beams over them as McCoy - apparently having the same idea as Spock - set his tricorder to start jamming the Gorn sensor devices.

Kirk made sure the others were still ahead of him as he passed Dallas' position, but hesitated for a moment when he didn't see Miri with either group. He followed Spock and Rand back another thirty meters behind Dallas and Bones, then ducked down in the tall grass and asked, "Where's Hallab? Was she hit?"

"She's engaging the flankers, Captain," Spock pointed with his finger towards the ancient road, at a point where Miri was lying prone on a piece of asphalt that had been pushed up from the ground by hundreds of years of rapid-aging vegetation. She was methodically plinking at the Gorn landing party as if she were shooting at tin cans on a fence, short and highly-controlled phaser beams into the heads and necks of anything she didn't recognize as human. Their shields could block the destructive energies of a phaser rifle, but they couldn't dissipate it as efficiently; Miri's sniping would only be more effective if she were firing bean bags out of a howitzer.

The sound of Gorn plasma weapons subsided off slightly, as did the sounds of explosions from the skull grenades. The combination of distance and return fire had bought them enough time to catch their breaths. "Enterprise, away team!" Kirk shouted into his communicator, "I _strongly_ suggest you beam us aboard now!"

_"Away team, Enterprise,"_ Uhura answered,_ "We're coming into position now, so... oh damn... standby, Captain, things are getting interesting up here."_

"Define interesting."

_"The Gorn vessel has changed orbits, coming over the horizon on a high-angle trajectory. At their present heading, they'll be in firing range in about two minutes!"_

Kirk was afraid of that. Apparently the Gorn orbit-operations commander - who by Gunbender's account had blanket authority over anything that happened while still _in_ orbit - was a bit too impetuous for his own good. Probably he'd decided it was simpler to dispose of the alien presence in orbit with them than continue to worry about potential complications. "We don't have time to get to a safe position! Get your shields up and break orbit _now_!"

_"Stand by, Captain. We're gonna give you some cover."_

Spock's tricorder whistled a warning and the Vulcan looked at the screen in alarm, "They've locked onto my tricorder!"

"Dammit... Covering fire!" Kirk shouted to McCahil's team as he snatched the tricorder from Spock's hand, wound up and threw it as hard as he could, straight back towards the Gorn as the four security officers opened up with their phasers. A dozen skull guns all fired at once from some place too far away to see, and a dozen blazing orange grenades sailed high up into the sky before raining down in a ragged pattern around where the tricorder had finally come to rest. A series of white hot explosions ripped the ground where Spock's communicator had come to rest, melting the ground around and beneath it into glass.

Kirk's communicator chirped again and Lieutenant Uhura's voice announced to all of them, _"Brace for support fire! Danger close!"_

It was all the warning they had before a dense cluster of bright red phaser beams poured out of the skies above and behind the Gorn. Each beam was _immense_, easily the width of a man's torso, and where each made contact with the ground a small artificial volcano erupted from the Earth, sending plumes of crushed rock and soil and incinerated vegetation geysering tens of meters into the air. It wasn't clear if they were specifically aiming at the Gorn or just blanketing the area to discourage their pursuers. Either way, the Gorn soldiers immediately scattered in every direction and seemingly forgot that Starfleet had ever landed an away team on this planet.

"Thank you, God!" Miri gasped, fully moved to tears by the very miracle she'd been praying for, "Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you..."

Kirk snapped open his communicator and bellowed, "Nice shootin', Sulu! We're the clear!"

_"We have your signal. Standby for transport."_

"We're ready, Enterprise. Beam us up." He closed his communicator and turned to Ensign Rand with a smile, "Well. _That_ was fun."

Rand either didn't hear him or didn't bother to respond. Her attention was focussed down the site of the phaser rifle, scanning the wall of madness that was Enterprise's ongoing phaser bombardment.

"Rand?"

"Sir?" She spared him a momentary glance, enough to reply, but not enough to break her concentration.

_"Transport in five... four..."_

"What do you think?" Kirk asked, looking at Rand out of the corner of his eye.

"About what, Sir?"

_"... Three... Two..."_

"It's not too late to go back to being a yeoman."

She glanced at him for a moment, showing slight confusion, followed in short order by a flash of amusement as the static discharge of the confinement beam began to crackle around her, "To hell with _that_!"


	15. Chapter 15

**CLOSE ENCOUNTER**

Doppelgänger Orbit  
Stardate 2261.3.4

- 2021 hours -  
The ship was already on Red Alert when the away team materialized in the transporter room. That was to be expected, considering the circumstances. What Kirk did _not_ expect was the sudden lurch against the hull and the sound of power generators straining somewhere as the deflector screens struggled to repel some kind of attacking energy. The inertial dampeners quickly cancelled out the vibration, and the Captain leapt from the transport pad to the hatch, already sprinting on his way to the nearest turbolift.

He got as far as the transporter room door when the room suddenly filled with screams. He made out the voices of Rand and Dallas, plus the transporter chief whose name he could never remember. But there was a third scream in the room, an almost animal-like howl of greater power and intensity than any human could aspire to, and it was coming from the transport chamber.

For whatever Miri had been on the surface of Doppelgänger, the thing that beamed back to the Enterprise was far from human. Standing seven feet tall, a black charred apparition with compound eyes and a pair of spiny mandibles for hands, roaring madly with a mouth large enough to swallow a man whole. Miri's duty uniform and field jacket were stretched to the tearing point around the alien, and the phaser rifle she'd been carrying was lying at its feet. It wasn't moving, it wasn't lunging, it wasn't even cowering as a frightened animal might. It was simply standing there, looking at its own clawed hands, _screaming_.

Somehow, it was still Miriam Hallab... But transformed into something else. Kirk didn't understand how or why, but with a battle unfolding around him he had exactly zero time to investigate. "You're on, Bones!" he shouted, and without waiting for a reply, sprinted into the corridor towards the nearest turbolift for the bridge. Spock was right behind him as ever, cool as a glacier and solid as a rock; between Miri's transformation and the firefight on the surface, Kirk's entire body was shaking like an old cellular phone.

"Evasive action! All phasers continuous fire," said Lieutenant Sulu, six seconds later as the Captain emerged through the turbolift on the starboard side of the bridge. The ship lurched again as something struck the deflector screens, but Kirk kept his footing just long enough to drop into his command chair as Spock moved towards the science station. "The Gorn vessel has moved back out of phaser range, Sir," Sulu reported along the way, "Multiple torpedoes inbound on our position, impact in twenty seconds! We're moving at full impulse power to try and evade!"

"Tactical plot, Mister Chekov," Kirk ordered. And at a push of the navigator's fingers, a tactical display appeared on the starboard HUD, showing Enterprise's position in near orbit of Doppelgänger; four small blips indicated a spread of fast moving objects that were racing towards the Enterprise in a close formation, almost like fighter planes on an attack run. Beyond the translucent display, Kirk could see the sweep of the stars as the ship was completing a fast evasive turn away from the alien torpedoes, and felt the slight pull in the deck as the thrust of the impulse engines argued with the inertial dampeners. An indicator on the viewscreen gave the range and impact estimates for the torpedoes, at this point counting down the last eight seconds before they would hit the ship.

Four seconds from impact, the four torpedoes broke their formation and split out into a wide pincer formation, attacking from all directions at once. In the last instants before they could impact, Enterprise's phaser banks opened fire all at once, and three of the Gorn torpedoes vanished into tiny puffs of ionized gas. The last weapon slipped past the phaser barrage and dove towards the ship at meteoritic speeds until - tens of kilometers from the ship - it slammed into the outer layers of the Enterprise's deflector screens and detonated in an impressive fireball.

The deflectors absorbed the expanding force of the explosion as well, through the engines and the plasma coils, transferred that momentum into the ship. Enterprise lurched violently backwards, and the lights dimmed slightly as a high pitched whine sounded from the main engines, already racing to full power. Sulu shouted in surprise, "Shields held, but main engines just spiked! We can't take many more of those, Sir!"

Spock added, "Picking up four more torpedoes heading our way. Impact in thirty five seconds."

In their previous encounters the Gorn had used small attack fighters to bolster their offensives and converted those fighters into suicide bombs when the battle didn't go their way. These torpedoes seemed similar, but Kirk sensed he was looking at something new. "Analysis on alien weapons, Spock."

A display appeared on the long monitor above the science console, displaying the Gorn torpedoes silhouettes. Despite what Kirk expected, the alien torpedoes were actually ring-shaped projectiles with a cylindrical core that spun along their axis of motion like drill bits as they flew. They were relatively large, easily five meters across, but the core section wasn't much larger than a standard photon torpedo. "I read them as strategic anti-ship weapons, Captain," Spock said as he completed his analysis, "Relatively long range, possibly equipped with their own small warp cores. Warhead consists of an antimatter-pumped fusion device, comparable yield of approximately one hundred isotons."

"Could we outrun them at warp?"

"Almost certainly," Spock said, "But I cannot estimate their maximum effective range. They may be able to pursue us indefinitely."

Kirk considered and dreaded the implications. They could go to warp and move to a position far from the planet, but the Gorn might still be able to attack them even from that distance and their torpedoes would still continue to harass them from the other side of the solar system. Sooner or later they might wear down their defenses...

The next wave of Gorn torpedoes appeared on the tactical display, twenty seconds from impact and closing at high velocity. Sulu was burning the impulse engines at full overboost to make the intercept that much harder, but there was no getting away from them at sublight now.

"Where's the Gorn ship?" Kirk asked.

Chekov answered on a reflex, "They have moved to a higher orbit, range eight thousand kilometers. Bearing zero three one mark eight."

It wasn't exactly close quarters, then. "Arm photons one through six," Kirk ordered, "Set warheads for proximity blast."

Chekov released safeties from his console, which in turn kicked the order to the tactical officers at the ops station to the left and in front of him. The port HUD transformed itself into the Fire Control graphic, showing load status of the torpedoes and a sensor scope image of the Gorn vessel framed in the targeting scanners. Within a heartbeat the Ensign answered, "Torpedoes armed and ready! Targeting Gorn wessel..."

"Negative! Fix all weapons on the enemy's torpedoes, interception points at four and two thousand kilometers. Wait for my command. Sulu, pitch us down ninety degrees at full impulse power and then cut your engines."

Sulu grunted acknowledgment and swung the bow ninety degrees straight down. Not that Enterprise actually began to travel in that direction - like the torpedoes, it was still hurtling around the planet below at thousands of meters per second - but the sudden move changed the ship's direction by such a huge degree that all five of the Gorn torpedoes had to stop and regroup to reconsider their programmed attack pattern.

And it was at that exact moment that Captain Kirk ordered, "Fire torpedoes!"

The entire bridge heard an audible tone from the weapons console warning the bridge crew of a torpedo launch, and then, all at once, six blue-white fireballs leapt out from under the saucer section and raced off into the distance like angry meteorites. Half a minute later, a ripple of blue-white fireballs danced among the stars, followed by several larger and brighter orange ones among them.

"All enemy torpedoes detonated, Captain," Spock announced, "The Gorn ship has changed course, now moving towards us at one-half impulse power..."

"Arm torpedoes seven through twelve, lock on and fire!"

"Guidance lock," Sulu reported, then "Firing!"

If the Enterprise was a baseball, the distance to the Francium ship would have spanned an olympic stadium; those six torpedoes covered that distance in about thirty seconds, homing on the energy signature of its sublight engines. Though naturally too far away to be seen with the naked eye, a magnified image now filled Enterprise's viewscreen showing the distant vessel maneuvering in space as a second wave of its super-torpedoes launched from slots along the hull, this time moving to intercept their Starfleet counterparts in space. Then a new wonder to behold: one of the torpedoes crackled in space, and in its place, another Francium now appeared. And again with another torpedo across from it, and two more below. In seconds, one Gorn ship with six torpedoes had become seven identical Franciums in a loose formation, moving towards the Enterprise. Kirk immediately saw that he couldn't tell which was the original and which were the duplicates; Spock saw that the torpedoes couldn't either.

Two photond dove at one of the new Franciums and passed right through it without detonating; the new ship flickered like a bad monitor image but suffered no damage at all. Two other torpedoes slipped into the middle of their targets and detonated; the phantom Franciums vanished without leaving so much as a scrap of debris behind. The last three closed in on the Francium at the very center of the new fleet, which suddenly began filling the sky with plasma bolts in a last-ditch effort to defend. Two of the photons were hit and destroyed before they could even detonate, but the sixth and final weapon slipped through and exploded against the Francium's starboard side. The Gorn ship lurched to port, tumbled for a moment out of control before it began to right itself, like a boxer shaking off a blow.

"Direct hit on enemy's starboard side," Spock reported, "Reading large-scale structural displacement, power fluctuations. We may have seriously damaged him."

Kirk didn't let himself feel relief yet. "Is he moving off?"

"Unknown. I _am_ picking up a power buildup in their engineering section. They may be preparing to go to warp."

On the tactical plot, Kirk watched as the power field around the Gorn ship continued to grow in strength, then an indicator that showed that another small object - one of their spinning ring-shaped torpedoes - had been ejected from the ship. The torpedo didn't accelerate immediately, in fact for several seconds it floated lazily in space alongside the Francium as if waiting for a signal from its mother ship. "Sulu, give me visual," Kirk ordered, and a telescope image appeared on the viewscreen showing the Francium and the small torpedo alongside.

It hadn't been apparent on sensors, but in the viewscreen image they could see what looked like flashes of lightning between the torpedo and the Francium's hull, an indicator of enormous power being transferred from the latter. The torpedo was even beginning to spin faster as it absorbed more energy from Francium's power field, glowing fiercely as it gained energy. Then the electrical discharges ceased. The torpedo hung in space for a moment, and then snapped forward like a bullet fired from an invisible gun.

A microsecond later a brilliant explosion filled the viewscreen. Enterprise lurched so violently to aftwards that most of the bridge crew was simply slammed to the deck as if they'd been slapped out of their chairs by a tidal wave. Ensign Chekov wound up on his back underneath his console, and Sulu's head bounced off his helm station and left a three-inch gash on his forehead with an audible, "Holy _shit_!"

Kirk struggled up to his hands and knees, shook the bells out of his ears and shouted over his shoulder, "Spock!"

The science officer was still climbing back to his console at this point, but through the audio pickup in his ear he could interpret the raw sensor data well enough to answer the implicit question, "They've transferred warp power to their weapons! That torpedo hit us at almost warp four!"

"Sulu, adjust your heading to-"

"Incoming fire!" Spock warned, and then a second shot struck the deflectors and slammed the Enterprise into a spin. This time most of the bridge officers were ready for it, but the suddenness of the impact still knocked half the crew out of their seats or slammed them against their consoles or the bulkheads next to them. It was like experiencing a train cash without a seatbelt; the inertial dampeners just couldn't keep up with that kind of sudden impact.

A small alarm sounded from the left side of the bridge, drawing the Captain's attention to one of the HUD displays that now showed a "Shield Status" graphic. It was a simple double-bar graph above a digram of the Enterprise with special emphasis on the warp nacelles, particularly in the deflector elements within them. The icon that represented the starboard nacelle was flashing red, and the twin bar lines that represented it - one for load and the other for output - were oscillating violently, as if someone were working over the sensors with a jackhammer. Kirk knew this pattern, of course, even before Scotty's voice thundered on the intercom, _"Engineering to bridge! Warp engines just red-lined! Deflectors are cutting out!"_

Four minutes, Kirk thought. They'd been fighting the Gorn for all of four minutes, not including the half a minute or more it had taken them to get to the bridge from the transporter room. For some reason, Kirk remembered Lieutenant Cartwright, another non-believer in No Win situations, his tactical operations instructor on their sophomore training cruise on the Farragut. Cartwright once told him that the average engagement between any two starships lasted between three and five minutes, while anything longer than that was usually a delaying tactic by the defeated party to evacuate its crew. Inexperienced commanders often had difficulty knowing whether or not victory was still achievable and committed themselves to battles they already lost; the smart commanders, Cartwright said, knew that that if they weren't close to achieving victory by the four minute mark, it was because they were _loosing_.

In this case, Kirk still had a few seconds left. And looking at the situation, he decided to settle for a draw. His deflectors still had a few seconds of life to them, therefore - by definition - so did his warp engines. "Arm remaining torpedoes! Transverse pattern, set for proximity blasts!"

"Ready, Sir," Chekov reported.

"Lock on the Francium and fire! Sulu, bring us to absolute heading three oh one mark zero, warp one!"

"Turning, Captain. Warp power coming up... twelve seconds to space warp..." A withering salvo - twelve more photon torpedoes - leapt from the weapons bay and quickly formed themselves into an attack pattern, four groups of tree, spreading out in a wide pattern to converge on the Francium from four different directions. Beyond the rim of the saucer and the receding fireballs, Kirk saw the horizon of the planet below shifting and turning as Sulu maneuvered the ship, vectoring the impulse exhaust to throw the ship through space like a stunt fighter. Something bright and frightening flashed past the viewscreen, and Kirk realized with a flash of panic that the Gorn had fired another one of their warp-speed torpedoes, and that this last weapon had cut _right through_ the deflectors only to miss the Enterprise by a few hundred maters.

After a few moments the ship stabilized its attitude and Sulu keyed up the ship's intercom, "All sections, standby for warp in six... five... four.. three.. two..."

Kirk saw the snap-streak of yet another torpedo zip past the ship, then the stars themselves exploded all around them. At that moment, the conspiracy of field coils and plasma dynamos that were the Warp Drive Engines created a distortion in space into which the Enterprise presently disappeared, like a raft going over the edge of a waterfall. Enterprise leapt forth - freed from the tyranny of Newton and even of Einstein - in an explosion of speed and power that registered on the Gorn monitors only as a massive gravitational disturbance. From there point of view, it was as if the Enterprise had simply disappeared; from Enterprise's point of view, the ship didn't move at all.

It would take a handful of seconds to surge out of Doppelgänger's orbit, less time than that to clear the Gorn's firing range. Once the drive engaged, Kirk silently counted to four, and then ordered, "All stop"

"All stop, Aye Sir," Sulu cut output from the warp engines, and almost at once their velocity dropped to nothing. Just as quickly as it had burst free, Enterprise came crashing back to the universe of mass and inertia, another floating object hurtling lazily and unpowered through space. Their new position was much higher in orbit than their original point, and it took a few moments of thrust from the impulse engines to give the Enterprise enough "real world" momentum to maintain a circular orbit without ultimately plummeting to the world below. "New position on viewer, Sir," Sulu reported, "We are one point four million kilometers from the Gorn vessel."

"Photon torpedoes have impacted, Captain," Spock reported from his sensor scope, "The Gorn vessel no longer register on our..." Spock looked up and slid his chair over to the library computer interface, "Fascinating!"

"We did we destroy their ship?"

"No, Sir. It has moved to a new position on the far side of the planet. A translocation of approximately twelve thousand kilometers."

Kirk raised a brow, "What'd they do, warp _through_ the planet?"

"There is a transient spatial distortion present near Francium's previous position. It is similar to the transwarp vortex we encountered near New Vulcan last year, but of much smaller magnitude and far less stable. I believe this may be the Gorn equivalent of warp drive."

"Good to know..." Kirk nodded, "Compute a course for orbit of the planet's outermost moon. The Gorn won't follow us that far."

Spock looked up from his science console, "How did you come to that conclusion, Captain?"

"Their science officer said something about their command structure being divided into different mission commands. He tried to warn me that their orbit operations commander is a bit trigger happy, and that if we wanted to get anywhere we should talk to their navigation commander."

"I don't understand..."

Kirk turned his chair and rested his elbows on his knees, "In the old days of space exploration, NASA used to have what they called the Ring of Command. A crew of thirty would have six or seven senior astronauts, each with their own speciality. One would command the launch phase, one would command the ship during planet crossings, one would be responsible for the landing, another would lead the expedition on the ground, another would be responsible for the launch and docking, and so on. At each phase of the mission they completely rearranged their entire command structure, so that each person was an expert in one particular field and merely proficient in all the others. It's kind of like we do today with different ship departments, you know?"

"And you believe the Gorn follow a similar Ring-structure for command authority?"

Kirk shrugged, "It may not be, but it's something like it. It was explained to me that they don't have an ultimate commander for the ship, it depends on what the ship's doing at any given time."

"Your theory seems correct, Keptin," Chekov volunteered, "alien wessel has scanned us, but is not pursing."

"Did we damage their engines or are they just hanging back?"

Spock looked at his sensor scope for a moment, "It is uncertain if any of our torpedoes impacted, but I am picking up some unusual power fluctuations from the Francium. Either the power transfer to their torpedoes or the sudden translocation appears to have considerably taxed their engines."

Kirk nodded, "Same boat as us, then. They jumped to warp to escape _our_ attack, same as we did."

"New orbit confirmed, Captain. ETA, one hour eighteen minutes to orbit of the outer moon," Sulu reported as a navigational graphic on the left side HUD showed their new orbit and a spiral course that turned into a ring five hundred kilometers over its surface.

"They won't follow us," Kirk repeated, "Navigation between planets would require a shift change. If their orbital commander wants a fight, he has to wait for me to come back into his jurisdiction. Besides, I think we've demonstrated that we're a pretty even match when it comes to combat."

"In the mean time," Spock said grimly, "We are effectively prevented from any further action on this planet until the Gorn leave the area."

"For the time being, yes. But we haven't run out of options yet." To this end, Kirk turned around and faced the communications station with a self-satisfied smirk, "Sulu, reload all torpedo bays and then have Mister Scott do a full workup on the deflector systems. Uhura, maintain standing yellow alert and assemble a damage report from all sections."

"Aye, Captain... and what about the Grazine, Sir? Should I tell them to abort the rendezvous?"

"Negative. As soon as they drop out of warp, arrange for new rendezvous coordinates in orbit of the-"

_"Sickbay to bridge! Urgent!"_

Kirk had almost forgotten about Miri. Remembering now filled him with a sense of dread even greater than the prospect of battle with the Gorn. Punching the intercom to sickbay, Kirk said, "Bones. How's the girl?"

_"Sedated, Jim. She's in a state of shock. Understandable considering what's happening to her."_

Kirk looked at the intercom as if someone had painted a clown face on it. "Yeah... what the hell _is_ happening to her? Transporter malfunction?"

_"I uh... Jim, honestly, I think you'd better get down here. Bring Spock too. You're gonna want to see this in person."_


	16. Chapter 16

**RAPID AGING**

Doppelgänger-B Orbit  
USS Enterprise (NCC-1701)  
Stardate 2261.3.4

- 2055 hours -  
"Wait, _that's_ Miri?" Kirk asked of the withered figure under the hospital blanket on the biobed. He'd been merely curious when he walked into sickbay and saw a mysterious woman in her mid seventies lying there in the infirmary section, but that curiosity had grown into near panic when McCoy told him the woman's name. "You can't be serious!"

"Serious as a heart attack," McCoy said, "We did another genetic screening a minute ago. The DNA is a perfect match to Miri's pattern. Besides, she looks _exactly_ like Miranda Anderson in her interviews in the 2070s"

"But the thing that materialized on the transporter..."

"She didn't stay that way for long. When we tried to take her to sickbay she..." McCoy shook his head in disbelief, "I don't know how to explain this, but we were carrying her - what she'd become - on a stretcher, and suddenly there was a flash of light and she as gone. There was this thing on the gurney the size of a baseball, this malformed lump of flesh... if I didn't know better, I'd say it was a _fetus_."

"A fetus..." Spock pondered this for a moment, but didn't comment further.

Kirk looked at the withered figure again, vaguely resembling the Miri he knew, but aged into a woman maybe a century old. "She _transformed_ into these things?"

"She did it right in front of us. It's the damnedest thing I've ever seen." And just in case there was any doubt, Bones walked to a computer console next to the biobed and replayed the security video from sickbay during the Gorn attack. The malformed lump of flesh that had been Miriam Hallab had already collected itself into something of a distorted toddler form, the kinematics of a premature baby with the size and girth of a three year old. At the first touch of the hypo, the poor child steadied and then seemed to inflate itself, rapidly into that of the elderly woman on the biobed now.

"I'll be..."

"Fascinating," Spock folded his arms, "Do you have any theory on how to account for this phenomenon?"

"I have a few, none of them good. I figure it has something to do with that weird duplicate planet she came from. And on Doctor Marcus' theory that the planet was recreated using some kind of nanotechnology, I did an electron microgram of a blood sample just before you two came in."

Kirk asked, "What did you find?"

Bones shrugged, "There's something weird in her blood plasma. A chemical trace. Something complicated like I've never seen before. My tricorder picked up a trace of it when I examined her a month ago. Reads like an explosive compound but it could also be something with some flimsy electron bonds... whatever it is, it's in abundance now. Her blood and muscle tissues are _saturated_ with it."

"Could it have been caused by the transporter beam?" Kirk asked, "We know our sensors can have an effect on the planet's variable aging cycle."

"If that's what triggered it, she would have gone through this the first time we beamed her up. It's got to be something else."

"The Gorn weapons perhaps? Or emotional stress?"

Spock stirred suddenly as something occurred to him, "They had to momentarily lower the deflectors in order to beam us aboard. The subspace distortion may have-"

There was a crackling/scratching sound from behind them, and all three turned just in time to see the wrinkled old woman change forms again, like a timelapse of a person aging in reverse. In a handful of heartbeats she again became Ensign Miriam Hallab, exactly as she had been when she beamed down; the newly restored youth sat up on the biobed and looked around perplexed, then looked at her hands and the tatters of her uniform and - finding them all relatively normal - asked plaintively, "Bones... What the hell is going on?"

Kirk stepped forward from the group and put his hand on her shoulder, "How much do you remember?"

Miri took a deep breath, then exhaled slowly, "That's a bigger question than you realize, Captain. I guess it depends on how much of it was real."

"What if _all_ of it was real?"

"Then I remember all of it, Sir. But it couldn't all be real."

"Why not?"

"Because I remember..." she hesitated at this point, not wanting to give away something that might either incriminate her or convince her newfound crew of her loss of sanity, "I remember things that couldn't possibly... couldn't _logically_ have really happened."

Kirk looked at McCoy helplessly.

"Miri," the Doctor said tenderly, "you underwent some kind of transformation. We don't know how or why, but we think it might have something to do with the use of our deflector shields. Do you remember any feelings or sensations that went with the transformations?"

Miri shook her head. "When we were beaming up, I remember feeling that we were finally going home. Then I looked at myself and my body was all..." she shuddered, "It was strange. It looked like I'd been burnt in a fire, but I felt cold."

"Cold?"

"Terrible, _terrible_ cold. So cold it was painful."

"Then what?"

"I remember... I remembering being small, not being able to move, then..." she decided to skip some of the details. Seventy five years worth of details, to be exact, and summarized it all as, "There was a jumble of crap that makes no sense at all, and then I think I passed out."

"You seemed to undergo an entire human lifecycle in the span of a few minutes," Spock pointed out, "Beginning from the moment of conception before leaping rapidly to old age."

"Just like the planet, come to think of it," Kirk said, "This is... worrisome."

"Tell me about it," Miri hung her head, "You don't know why this happened to me?"

McCoy sighed, "We've never seen anything even remotely like this. I don't have the first clue what caused it."

"What would you need in order to find out?"

"I'd have to take some tissue samples, run a few tests. It'll take some time. Meanwhile," McCoy looked at Miri, "Take a few days medical leave. After that, if you feel fit to return to duty..."

"Bones, I know how this is going to sound, but right now the last thing I need is to be sitting around, left to my own devices, with plenty of chances to scare the hell out of myself. I want to go back on duty as soon as possible. I still have a lot of training to do..."

"I understand that. But until I know for sure your condition is stable, I'm ordering you to take the day off from your normal duties. If you _must_ occupy yourself, I suggest you study up on your cadet's service manual for next month's exams."

Reluctantly, Miri nodded in agreement. "You know where to find me..."

"Right down the hall to the left of the armed guards and the cluster bombs." McCoy winked at her, "Stay put for a big longer. I want to run a few more scans to make sure you're not going to turn into a dinosaur or something, and then you'll be free to go."

Slightly embarrassed, but feigning ignorance, Miri nodded and laid back on the bed.

McCoy slid back the privacy curtain around her biobed, then he lead the Captain and Science officer to his office across the medical bay. Once he was sure they were out of earshot he said, "You know, McCahil wanted those kids disarmed. He was worried they might try some ill-advised takeover of the compartment..."

"I have spoken with the one called Peter the Rabbit," Spock said, "He denied any knowledge of the subject, of course, but he insisted - hypothetically - that _any_ visitor to the Enterprise would take such prudent measures as long as the reavers were aboard. I also agreed to his... er... hypothetical scenario."

Kirk grinned, "I've been hearing about that kid. Some kind of junior philosopher of the group..."

"Despite his unusual moniker, the boy is blessed with an almost professorial intellect. Though I have not been able to locate his original, I suspect he may have been well regarded in his adult years."

"Speaking of the reavers," McCoy said, "When Miri went through that trans-"

"Lemme stop you for a minute..." Kirk raised his hand in a "halt" gesture, "those two reavers are still on board, right? What do you want to do with them?"

McCoy folded his arms, "If it was up to me, I'd send them back where they came from. But Ramsi's against it, and I almost agree. With the rapid aging effect on that planet, it's basically a death sentence. Then again, they're not much better off with _us_. Alive, yes, but not much else."

Spock nodded in agreement, "Despite our efforts to stimulate what may remain of their sapient background, the two reaver specimens have demonstrated no higher cognitive function beyond expression of basic instinct. After murdering the lone caveman we recovered, their main activities have been reduced to sleeping, consuming food and copulating, and they seem capable of little else."

"Wait. The female reavers are having sex with _each other_?" Kirk raised a brow, "Damn, I don't know if that's disgusting or kinky."

"Are you finished being an idiot, Jim? This could be serious."

"Sorry, Bones. Go ahead."

McCoy sighed, and continued his earlier interrupted thought, "When Miri went through that transformation, I got a good look at the tissues and body structures involved. It wasn't just the mutilated flesh of a transporter accident. It transformed her into a completely different _kind_ of organism. She changed into a fetus pretty quick, but the transformation did leave a bit of residue on the gurney from the original form. I had the lab put the scraps under a microscope, just in case."

"What did they find?"

"They found _this_." McCoy tapped an icon on one of the monitor screens and a micrograph report came up on the screen. "The exobiology lab thinks it's some kind of acidophile tissue from complex, multi-cellular life form. High proton mobility, probably all-around kinetic-acid stability. Also alot of crystalized carbon in the cell membranes."

Kirk looked at Spock, wondering - and hoping - that his science officer knew what McCoy was talking about.

Spock did, but not to the point of its relevance. "This would suggest an organism adapted to a highly acidic environment."

"And extremely high temperatures at that," McCoy added, "Or so the exolab thinks. Lieutenant Collins says it's the sort of thing that would be comfortable on Venus."

Kirk flinched, "Wait a minute. We beamed back to the Enterprise only fifteen minutes ago? When did you have time to send tissue samples to the exolab?"

McCoy frowned, "I didn't. I took some tissue samples from the Reaver specimen Ensign Riley recovered. The malignant samples underwent a drastic morphological change just a couple of days after removal, so I turned them over to exobiology for culturing and analysis. Their preliminary analysis revealed _this_," he gestures at the images on the monitor, "Which turns out to be an exact match to the residue on Miri's gurney."

"So if you were to strip the Reavers of all their malignant tissues..."

"...they would start to revert into whatever organism _this_," McCoy pointed at the monitor, "belongs to."

Spock nodded slowly, finally comprehending. "So you're saying the form that beamed back to the Enterprise was a form indigenous to this planet."

"More than that, Jim," McCoy said, "It's _Miri's_ form. It's what she _really is_."

Spock nodded as he understood McCoy's implications, "When we look at Miri and the children, we're looking at a human pattern that has been superimposed on an alien form of life. Circumstances suggest this is one-to-one conversion of one organism into another."

"And the reavers," McCoy was thinking out loud, "It must be... A hybridization of some kind. Maybe a transitional state between the human pattern and the original."

Kirk got a mental flash of the thing that had materialized in the transporter room wearing Miri's uniform. He hadn't noticed it until it started screaming; it didn't start screaming until it looked at its hands... "It's not just their physical form, Bones. They think they're human. They don't remember _being_ anything else."

Spock stood a little taller, as if inflated from within by a sudden explosion of ideas. "It stands to reason that the humanoid form of these creatures is being sustained artificially, in which case the Reaver transformation commences immediately following the cessation of external controls. There may be an identifiable mechanism at work here."

"Something that not only transformed them into a completely different life form, but it's actively _keeping_ them that way," McCoy said, folding his arms, "What the hell kind of technology could even _do_ that?"

Spock only half registered the question. He was already on his way out of sickbay when he composed an answer, almost as an afterthought, "When I have an answer, Doctor, you will be the first to know."

.

- 2204 hours -  
Samir and Michael stirred at the sound of the turbolift. Not that they expected an alien invader would travel through the ship by turbolift, but there was always a need to seem innocent and - most importantly - _unarmed_ whenever Starfleet officers came through this part of the ship. Though unscheduled visits were rare, ship's business came in many shapes and sizes, and reports of a bunch of squirrelly kids wandering around with sub machinepistols would create complications that the Onlies did not need.

Both boys briefly pretended to have absolutely nothing to do, Michael leaning nonchalantly against the corridor wall and Samir suddenly paying very close attention to the screen of an iPod that hadn't worked in years. The turbolift stopped at the deck below, and then footfalls sounded from the ladder well down the corridor as someone began to climb. When Miri emerged into the corridor, they relaxed a little, but kept up their charade of nonchalance until she was close enough to talk in just-above-a-whisper, "Where's everyone?"

"Talking to Peter," Samir said, without looking up from the screen. He didn't need to look up, over the years he'd sharpened his peripheral vision into an almost radar-like precision, "Everyone's all jumpy. What's going on out there? Where have you been?"

"Come on, I'll tell you all about it."

"Shouldn't we stay here on guard? What if the monsters get loose?"

"Just come on. You'll want to hear this. All of you."

As it stood, everyone else was gathered in the corridor begging Peter the Rabbit for answers anyway. He was by no means the wisest or most experienced of the group, but he had the most confidence of them all and a knack for pulling up wild guesses that just happened to be correct, and this made him valuable in a crisis of impotence. Miri remembered from a year ago that Peter the Rabbit had managed to whip the entire crew back into working order after a storm had killed the diesel on their fishing boat; while Miri got together an ad hoc engineering team to make repairs, Peter single handedly sequestered the crew in the wardroom and bombarded the lot of them with such artful rhetoric that would have made Malcolm X look like Alan Colmes.

Presently he was in the middle of a long speech about how their indomitable spirit had carried them through far greater trials than this when Miri entered the passage and stole the stage by default. Peter the Rabbit seamlessly transitioned from speaker to audience as all eyes turned to her.

The first words she spoke were the most pertinent, even if they weren't most relevant to what the Onlies were worried about. "Guys, the dreams aren't dreams. They're real."

Everyone looked at her confused for a moment. Forest-Forest-Gump was the first to ask, "_What_ dreams?"

"The dreams that Jasmine and Leila and Nabi and... and..."

"Samir and Louis and Khan and Horace," Miri finished as Peter stepped back into obscurity, "We all had the same dreams. We all thought they were premonitions. But they're not premonitions. They're _memories_."

"Memories?" Samir asked.

"Memories of the people we were meant to be. I think whatever created our planet wanted to be able to rewind and fast forward to different points in history. It gave us all the memories we would need along that continuum, but we couldn't use those memories until the right time. Like the second moon. None of us remember there ever being two moons on Earth, right? The time when we first noticed it, I'm sure that's as far back as our _real_ memories go. Everything before that is just copied data."

A stir went through the assembled group. Not panic or disturbance, just a bit of incredulity and anxious acceptance of what half of them had already begun to suspect.

Peter the Rabbit was the first to ask, "So what _are_ we? Walking VCRs?"

Miri remembered materializing in the transporter room, the feeling of terrible cold, the way the air burned her skin, the disfigurement of her hands. The reflection of herself - the thing she had become - on the console's radiation shield. _What we really are..._ "Sort of," she began, but that didn't seem right. Whoever had bothered to get this information also found a need to give it expression in living, thinking, talking bodies. More to the point, it had stopped the playback at a specific moment and allowed part of those stored memories to be overwritten with new ones. Obviously, the old memories were still intact somehow... "I don't think it matters though. We were allowed to come aboard this ship with these people, so I think that for whatever purpose we were made, we've fulfilled that purpose and now we can do as we wish."

"Or maybe we're just not needed right now?" asked The Other Jasmine, "You know, I'm not religious like Pete, but I was just thinking, what if this is all part of God's plan?"

From somewhere deep within a memory that Miri had recently had the horrifying pleasure of experiencing, she asked, "Define God."

"Um... the creator of the world... and everything..."

"Same difference. Whatever created our world - let's call it God, for simplicity - whatever it is, it had a purpose for us. It must have been a very specific purpose because we all have a lifetime of memories stored inside of us somewhere..."

"How do _you_ know this all of a sudden?" Asked Leila, neatly interrupting her brother who was about to ask the same question, "What's happened out there anyway?"

Miri summarized: "They needed me for a mission on the planet. We all beamed down to stonehenge in England. Except it _wasn't_ stonehenge... it wasn't the stonehenge of the Other Earth. It was some kind of alien machine that extends all the way to the center of the Earth. The Gorn - the other aliens - landed there too, and we ended up in a gunfight."

"Whoa!"

"You got shot at by aliens?"

"Did you kill anyway?"

"What'd they look like?"

"Did they have acid for blood?!"

"Did they have two heads?"

"Was it scary?"

"_Shut up_!" Miri snapped her fingers, and the corridor became silent again, "Mister Spock beamed us back aboard right when their starship attacked us. The Captain fought them off, but we've had to change orbits now so we're much farther from Earth than before. The weirdest thing is, when the transporter brought me aboard... well first it turned me into an alien, and then I turned into a baby and aged into an old lady all in a few minutes. And all the time I had all my memories of my whole entire life. It was exactly like my brain was being fast-forwarded."

"But you're okay now?" asked The Other Jasmine, "You look pretty normal."

"I'm fine. _Better_ than fine... well... _sort of_ fine. I feel like I just woke up from one hell of a crazy dream, and for some reason there's alot of new things that I know about..."

"What about the monsters?" Nabi asked, "The battle didn't... like... loosen their cage or anything, did it?"

"No, they're all safely locked away. I heard them talking before I left. They're doing some experiments on the monsters to see if they can turn them back into their original forms."

Peter the Rabbit nodded sagely, "That _would_ be a nice change of pace. Maybe we could save some of the people who-"

"You know something? Mister Spock thinks the monsters only change when they're close to Earth. I think he's wrong. I think if Bones tries to undo whatever's been done to us, it'll only make things worse. Starfleet is dealing with forces they can't understand. They're doing their best, but they're missing key pieces of the puzzle."

"Like what?"

"For one thing, their transporter device transformed me into all sorts of different things. They don't even know why."

"God alone knows why," said Peter the Rabbit, "But do you want to know _my_ theory?"

His theories were getting more interesting every day. Miri shrugged, "Go ahead."

"_I_ think it was a message."

"A message?"

Peter the Rabbit nodded.

"From who? From God?"

"Maybe... but I think, a message from the planet."

Miri put her hands on her hips and stared at him angrily. This was not one of Peter the Rabbit's better theories. "The _planet_ sent us a message?"

"It sent _you_ a message."

"Really?"

"It's a pretty smart planet. I must have realized you were training to become an member of the crew, so it gave you some information it thought you might need. That _is_ what happened, isn't it?"

Miri nodded slowly, "It gave me the memories my... Well... Of my duplicate's future. The space program and the Eugenics Wars and the Calypso's mission. I remember it all like it actually happened to me. Which is weird, right?"

"Not so much. The planet was giving you the memories you would need to properly fit in to your new environment. It wants you to fit in and be comfortable no matter where you are."

Miri sighed, "If you say so..."

"I found a movie in the Enterprise's computer. An old American movie. About these guys at the bottom of the sea, they find a space ship with a big golden ball in the middle of it. One of the scientist guys thinks the ball is alive, because it has a reflective surface, but it doesn't reflect _everything_. Like, it doesn't reflect their suits and their lights, for example. It chooses what it will and will not reflect."

"What does that have to do with anything?"

"Well, think about it. We came from a planet that's, like, basically a mirror image of another planet. It had everything on it that the old one have, but the one thing it _didn't_ have was humpback whales."

Miri remembered the summary report Mister Spock had given her to review, mainly on the assumption that she might want to add something form her own unique perspective. She had added quite a few notes and confirmations and cleared up a few confusions of details, but for her, the report had raised more questions than it answered. "Mister Spock thinks that whoever created this planet created it just to harvest those whales for some purpose."

"That could be, but I doubt it."

"How would you know? Spock's a genius."

"But he doesn't know this planet," Peter the Rabbit rhetorically dismissed him with a wave of the hand, "And he doesn't know us. And besides, he's one of those smart guys who makes big stupid assumptions without realizing the obvious. Like the religious teachers we used to have. He just assumes that somebody out there must have created this planet, just like the religious teachers always assumed that God created the Earth. Well you know and I know that this planet created _itself_."

"We know that?"

"_I_ know that."

"How do you know that?"

"I just do."

Miri rolled her eyes.

"But we just recently found out that this planet was created in the image of another planet. Which means..."

Leila smiled brightly, finally catching on, "Wait... the planet created itself... but it created itself in an intelligent way... I get it! That means it's a smart planet!"

"Exactly."

"Smart planet..." Miri thought about this, and in a way it was beginning to make more and more sense. Certainly the one question Spock's report had raised for _her_ was the matter of how an alien intelligence could have gathered that much information about Earth and its people without being noticed. Quite probably, it didn't have to: it simply looked across the cosmos and reflected what it saw there, duplicated it without really knowing what it was duplicating. Smart planet indeed, but with the question in mind, "Why wouldn't it copy those whales?"

"Maybe it just doesn't like whales?"

Miri thought about this for a long moment. But since they were on the subject of old American science fiction anyway, another idea occurred to her from a half-remembered (but oh-so-cherished) novel she once read in that shattered library in Haifa, years before all the books had decomposed, "Maybe it doesn't _need_ to copy whales?"

"Why wouldn't it need to copy whales?"

"Why would it need to copy humans? To learn more about them and how they live, right? And they let the world go crazy as part of an experiment. Maybe testing humanity's tolerances to extreme forces."

"But they don't care about whales, though?"

"If I had to guess," Miri said, "It's because they _already know_ about the whales."


	17. Chapter 17

**THE GENESIS FILE**

Doppelgänger-B Orbit

USS Enterprise (NCC-1701)

Stardate 2261.3.6

- 0650 hours -

"Bridge to all decks, red alert. Weapons bay, stand by for immediate weapons release." The rising tone of the red alert claxon sounded next, joined by flashing lights and the sounds of pressure doors dropping to isolate independent sections of the ship. Back on a combat footing for the fifth time in two days, and judging by the sound of his voice, Lieutenant Sulu found it a lot less exciting than he had the first two times.

Kirk pushed his chair back from his desk terminal and snapped his communicator open. It found the bridge intercom immediately and he demanded, "Talk to me, Sulu."

"Same as before, Captain. Inbound torpedoes, bearing two eleven mark six. Impact trajectory in forty two minutes..." a long pause on the intercom circuit, and then Kirk heard the whistle of a power transfer and the distant reverberation of a torpedo launch, like the sounds of gigantic springs recoiling back and forth. Six torpedoes, from the sound of things, which meant the Gorn had fired a full spread as well. "Interception at z-minus twenty one minutes," Sulu added, "Second wave can intercept at z-minus eight. Phasers are standing ready and deflectors remain fully operational."

"Have we figured out yet why they haven't tried warp-charging their torpedoes again?"

"The warp charge was pretty effective, but it lacks accuracy. Weapons lab thinks it's probably a planetary bombardment weapon and not an anti-ship one. When they used it on us, it was probably a desperation move."

Kirk grunted, "Make sure they haven't launched a second wave at us, and then downgrade to yellow alert. I want the ship ready to receive our Cardassian guests when they arrive."

"Aye, Sir."

In all the previous attacks, Kirk had come directly to the bridge to check on the situation in person, only to be told that Sulu or Spock had already taken appropriate counter measures, programming their photon torpedoes to intercept the incoming Gorn torpedoes halfway between Doppelgänger and Enterprise. The attack before last had seen the Francium launching their torpedoes in a staggered formation so the interceptors could only hit two of the four; the second wave torpedo strike had cleaned them up before they even got into phaser range. The leading opinion among the command staff was that the Gorn were determined to keep the Enterprise away from Doppelgänger and that these random torpedo attacks were kind of harassment strike meant to disrupt their scientific mission as much as humanly (Gornly?) possible.

Actually, it was working, if the report on his desk terminal was any indication. Captain Kirk got the planetologists' reports as part of his daily briefing, typically two hundred thousand words worth of memos, complaints, reports, announcements, mission logs of the department heads, and journal-style abstracts from every department of the ship, even the engineering section, each of which had the unnerving tendency to make otherwise terribly boring subjects seem both urgent and interesting. As Captain, it was Kirk's job to sign off on the daily digest and commit it to archives for transmission to Starfleet with their next upload. It wasn't necessary to read over every last detail of the reports; the department heads would handle that, and summarize any outstanding issues in the report summary. It wasn't even necessary for the Captain to read through every summary; _that_ was the Science Officer's job, being ultimately responsible for the execution of the ship's mission.

But Spock had chosen to make the Captain personally aware of an official protest from the Enterprise' planetology department over the allocation of their resources for the course of this mission. The protest was strongly worded and unusually detailed, evidently the third such incident the department had logged in as many weeks, which probably meant that Lieutenant O'Grady had filed the protest in frustration rather than out of necessity. One detail in particular stood out: the fact that "the civilian meddlers," as O'Grady described them, continued to use the planetology lab's resources even under alert conditions, which O'Grady believed - Kirk knew, _correctly_ - was in direct violation of Starfleet regulations.

Since Kirk had a pretty good idea who "the civilian meddlers" were, he decided to look into this personally.

Enterprise's single planetology lab was a large circular room built into one of the research modules in Compartment 105, five decks below and immediately aft of the bridge. Normally, the room was dedicated to the detailed analysis of alien worlds using combinations of probe readings and orbital scans to construct a perfect digital model of that planet and its manny natural features. The model itself dominated the center of the room as a six foot translucent sphere lined with forcefield diodes, host to a realtime dimensional image so detailed that one could pick out individual skyscrapers with a large enough magnifying glass. On his arrival, Captain Kirk saw the model of Doppelgänger flickering erratically as minute details were fed into the holographic matrix to alter its overall shape. The computer model wasn't just a recording tool, it was also a predictive tool that helped that planetologist refine the fidelity of their model against the real thing; every few hours, the sensors would take another detailed sweep of the planet in question and then compare those scans with the model, recording any differences and leaving the scientists to modify the equations and functions in their model until those differences vanished.

The source of their frustration was already evident. The fact that Doppelgänger was in a kind of chronological flux introduced so many random factors that the model was probably unacceptably randomized even under the best of circumstances; this alone would be tolerable to a team of dedicated Starfleet explorers who loved a challenge anyway, were it not for the presence of Doctor Carol Marcus and three other blue-shirted physicists who were, at this very moment, feeding variables into the simulation computer using an old Hesperian palmcomp with an old-fashioned fold out keyboard. A large crowd of red-uniformed paleontologists had congealed around a monitor station on the far side from the door, most of them muttering angrily to each other in quiet but furious protests. The arrival of the Captain changed their mood from one of resentment to one of hope, since there was little other reason he could have been here now except that Lieutenant O'Grady must have made good on his threat.

Doctor Marcus didn't even notice his arrival, though her two companions - Bates and McGreggor, if he remembered the names correctly - regarded his arrival with shrill terror and astonishment, like a couple of commuters watching a bengal tiger climb into their train. Kirk didn't mince words with any of them, his purpose here was much too specific. He simply cleared his throat, reached past Doctor Marcus and plucked the wire from the palmcomp out of the simulation computer.

Marcus whirled on him as if she was about to throw a punch. She very nearly did, even after she recognized exactly whose hand had unplugged her handset. "Why would you do that? Are you daft?!"

"Starfleet General Order Six," Kirk said slowly, "clearly states that all non-essential scientific and computer resources are to be secured during alert condition red."

"This _is_ essential, Captain! This laboratory..."

"All exceptions to be handled at the discretion of Starfleet Command Division personnel."

Marcus rolled her eyes and plugged the computer back into the terminal, "Don't quote rules, Captain. This mission is too important to hide behind some bloody regula-"

"This ship is not your personal playground, Doctor," Kirk unplugged it again, and this time snatched the computer from her hand, "As long as you are aboard my ship, you _will_ abide by those bloody regulations just like everyone else. Is that understood?"

"_You_ of all people shouldn't be lecturing me about the following the rules!"

"I only break the rules when I have to. Not just because it's convenient."

"It's _not_ a convenience! It's really just an _in_convenience for small-minded people!" she shot a nod at O'Grady, who - along with the rest of her staff - was watching the scene with an increasingly satisfied grin.

"Look, I get it. You're the admiral's daughter, you're used to people letting you do whatever you want..."

"Oh, _please_..."

"But that's not gonna fly here, and I really think you're mature enough to know that. You gotta learn to play nice with the other kids, okay?"

Doctor Marcus took a deep breath, smoothed her hair back and breathed out slowly. "I'll try to be more accommodating in the future. But this simulator..." she started talking faster and more excitedly with every syllable, "it's the only computer on the ship that could handle the test parameters we're working on. With a conventional unit, even a supercomputer, it might have taken us _years_ just to develop a suitable engine-"

"We have these regulations for a _reason_, Doctor. If you do not get proper authorization for the use of Enterprise's resources," Kirk cut her off, "Not only will you never again have access to this computer, but I'll see to it you never get access to _any_ computer, ever again, anywhere on the ship."

She looked at the ceiling, drowning in frustration, "God..."

"It's pronounced 'Kirk'. And this is the only warning you get, Doctor."

Marcus shifted her weight angrily. As was her custom, she immediately assumed that Kirk's objection to her activities was in ignorance; like so many others, he must have misunderstood what she was doing here and couldn't grasp how important it really was.

Much as it demeaned her to do so, she would have to enlighten him. "Captain, my team has some working theories about how the transformation might occur. I'm working on a self-regulating phase-wave process, something a bit like the force-transfer fields in photon torpedoes. I think the timeslip anomalies aren't as random as we thought, they look to me like aftershocks, like standing waves left over from the planet's creation. It's an emergent property, so it's hard to analyze, but if we run the sequence in reverse," Marcus grabbed the wire and plugged it back into the computer, even without bothering to retrieve the actual handset from Kirk, "we can get a general process template for the planet's formation on macro-scale. Obviously this isn't very helpful in determining the causal mechanism, but it gives us a good paradigm to simulate the finer details of-"

Kirk pulled the wire again, just as Marcus' simulation started to load on the hologram. This time, he turned off the palmcomp and handed it to one of her subordinates, then walked slowly away from the modeling computer and gestured for Marcus to follow.

"Well don't you understand?" Marcus said as she followed him - it turned out - right through the door and out into the corridor, "Not only will this solve the paleontologists' collective headaches, it will help us unlock the secrets of this planet. This is, like, the bloody holy grail of modern terraforming! This is what humans have dreamed about since we invented the first telescopes."

"Terraforming." Kirk leaned on the corridor wall next to the door, "Right, that makes sense."

Marcus flinched, "What makes sense?"

"Your accent, the way you talk, that damned old computer in there... You're Hesperian aren't you?"

Marcus looked slightly offended. But only slightly. It was a trait of Martians in general and Hesperians in particular to be proud of their colonial heritage while at the same time profoundly ashamed to have it recognized by outsiders. "Is there something _wrong_ with that?"

"Well Admiral Marcus was Californian. But you used your mother's name when you first came aboard last year, so..." come to think of it, there had always been something eerily familiar about Carol Marcus since the day she came on board. He'd thought it was simply the odd similarity she bore to his Aunt Betty (before she left for Tarsus IV; she was never the same again when she came back). But there was something more specific than that, something personally familiar that he associated with not just the person but the name too. And if Carol Marcus really was from Mars, he had a pretty good idea what it was. "That means you lied about your age to get into Oxford," he said, recalling her dossier, and then going on a hunch he added, "And you probably had Old Gil pull some strings for you too."

"Yeah, So what?" Marcus scowled at him, "This coming from the most inexperienced captain in the entire Starfleet... wait..." she flinched, "How do you know John Gil?"

"Because I sat three rows behind you in history class in college. University of Iowa, class of 52. I'm not surprised you don't remember me..."

"You were at Iowa? James... you're _that_ James?"

Kirk smiled, "What James?"

"Gary Mitchel's friend James? The guy who used to hang out with Ruthie at that hick bar in the cornfields?" Marcus took a step back, stunned and surprised, but also overjoyed, "Shit... I thought you were in _prison_!"

"Breaking out of prisons is an old hobby of mine," Kirk said only half-jokingly, "Though I don't think I'll have to worry about that anymore with this new job. Still, you were only at Iowa for that one semester, right? Only reason I remember you is because you were constantly crabby and totally anti-social," and he refrained from the excessive honesty of adding, "and I had a huge crush on you the whole time" and simply went on, "So, still the same, more or less."

Marcus rolled her eyes, "I don't remember _anything_ about you. Except that you had a big mouth and a bad sense of humor. That's probably why you were hanging out with a wanker like Gary Mitchell... what _happened_ to him anyway? I figured he was probably in prison with you after the thing with that Suliban musician..."

"That wasn't us. Some Tandarians got in a fight with the guy, and they followed him home and tried to burn his house down. Anyway, I ended up convincing Gary to join Starfleet."

Marcus grinned, "I would have expected you'd have brought him on board with you the way you two used to hang out."

"I _did_ bring Gary on board. He was killed in action on our first assignment together."

Marcus hesitated, struggled for words. Then she shrugged, "A hero's death. That's how he would have wanted it. Posthumous two-rank promotion too, right?"

"Why do you have such a chip on your shoulder, Carol?" Kirk folded his arms.

"What do you mean?"

"Ever since we left Earth, you've done nothing but stomp around this ship like everyone here is in your way. Like anything that isn't done specifically for you is a waste of time."

She shrugged, "I can't help it. I'm Hesperian."

"Don't give me that. You know good and damn well the data we're gathering from this planet could take generations just to process it all, let alone try to replicate the process. Why are you in such a hurry?"

"Isn't it obvious?" Marcus looked up and down the corridor as if the answer was some big secret. Whether personal conceit or long-developed reflex, it was hard even for her to tell, "I just told you, this technology is the holy grail of human terraforming. The first person who figures out how it works will have a place in history right next to Isaac Newton and Zephram Cochrane..."

"And there's nothing more personal than that?"

Marcus stared at him for a moment, "What are you asking me, exactly?"

"Forget it, it's not important. There's only one thing that _is_ important: the Enterprise is a starship, not university science lab, and as long as you are a member of this crew, you will observe proper procedures for the allocation of resources and equipment. If I get any more reports about your team interfering with normal Starfleet operations, I'll strand you on Doppelgänger until its creators show up and give you the secret in person."

"Don't even joke about that..."

Kirk looked her dead in the eye, the kind of fierce penetrating look that a lion usually gives to its unsuspecting prey just before making a kill. With this, he said slowly, "Do I _look_ like I'm joking?"

Doctor Marcus decided not to answer the question, since the rational part of her knew that he was, but another part - the primal, instinctual part that was still programmed to react to body language instead of intellectual discipline - wasn't so sure. "It... um... won't happen again, Captain. I'm sorry."

"That's good to know," but his expression didn't soften. And unbeknownst to Doctor Marcus, Kirk had actually spent most of his sophomore year at the academy perfecting this staredown, and had polished it so thoroughly that it ultimately earned him an honorary 'Best Poker Face Ever' award in the academy yearbook. He even managed to hold the expression when his communicator chirped and he answered the call in an official and regular, "Kirk here."

_"Captain,"_ Spock's voice said on the intercom, immediately indicating this page as some extreme importance, _"A second wave of Gorn torpdoes has been intercepted and we are now standing down to yellow alert. Also, sensors have located the Cardassian starship Grazine approaching at warp five. Estimated time to orbital rendezvous is three hours, eighteen minutes."_

"Almost seven hours ahead of schedule. It's almost as if they wanted to catch us off guard."

_"Indeed." _Not that Spock would ever admit it, but the amusement in his voice was _almost_ detectable.

"Okay. Linguicode standard greeting, confirm their identity and rendezvous coordinates. Kirk out." He snapped the communicator closed and - still staring a hole in Doctor Marcus - said, "Duty calls. Stay out of trouble, Carol."

"I'll do my best, Jim..." she watched him turn on his heels like one of the generals in old war movies and march into the nearest turbolift, probably headed for the bridge. Once he was gone, she returned to the planetology lab were her defeated contingent was standing off to the side, watching the Starfleet team thoroughly enjoy being able to use their own equipment for the first time in four days. Marcus was annoyed, as there was still more work to be done and more data that needed modeling, but so far she was satisfied with what the computer had already shown her and she decided to process this little bit before coming back for the rest later. "Bates, McGreggor, let's compile the simulation with what we have so far. That'll give us some idea of how big the gaps are that need to be filled."

Both of them seemed to love this idea, since it meant removing themselves from the permanent stinkeye from the planetologists. He handed over the palmcomp to Doctor Marcus and then handed over three of its memory cards; Marcus plugged all three cards into the computer's data slot and then set the computer to translate the machine code from the simulation computer into object code for the imaging program on this palmcomp's more powerful big brother. Compiling the program took a handful of seconds, but it ground to a halt once the computer prompted her for a file name. "What the hell?"

"What?" Bates asked.

"It's asking for a file name. Didn't we already have a file name from the last batch?"

Bates shrugged dumbly. Hesperian computers were famous for excelling at complicated operations while totally failing to perform more basic tasks due to random and unpredictable hickups.

Marcus first tried the file name they'd been working with for the past several weeks already, typed in _Project Marduk_, and told the computer to save. Marduk, of course, being a reference to the Summerian creation myth, the deity that slew the monster Tiamat and created the world by forging order out of cosmic chaos.

Another dialog box and a synthesized feminine voice told her, _"File already exists."_

And why the hell did it go to voice command all of a sudden? Stupid machine. "So overwrite the existing file."

_"Cannot overwrite. File name Project Marduk is being used by another application. Do you wish to save the compiled program under a different name?"_

Marcus sighed, "There are not enough words in the English language to describe how much I _hate_ this computer..."

_"File name must be sixteen characters or less. Please choose another filename."_

If this thing didn't contain information so priceless to her career, she would have smashed it against the wall right then and there. First, though, she swallowed her temper, gave it half a second thought, and rattled off a quick filename that was similar enough to the original that she could still find it and change it back once this stupid machine recovered from its temporary bought of electronic idiocy. "Save under 'Project Genesis.' And then port it to a memory card, universal format, so I can run the program on a set that _isn't_ an outdated overpriced piece of shit."


	18. Chapter 18

**RENDEZVOUS**

Doppelgänger-B Orbit  
USS Enterprise (NCC-1701)  
Stardate 2261.3.6

- 0750 hours -  
The Detapa Republic Space Vessel Grazine eased into a slot position off the Enterprise's starboard bow, its fusion drives firing at almost right angles to the ship's present orbit. For some reason the Cardassians had decided to make the final rendezvous with a complicated plane-change maneuver instead of simply aligning their entry point to bring them right to interception point with Enterprise. Kirk suspected it was a way to look over their potential ally from a distance before making the actual rendezvous.

Grazine was larger than Kirk expected it to be, in fact it was slightly larger than some Starfleet vessels, just over four hundred meters long and massing a little over one hundred thousand tons. It was a long, slender craft with a blunt nose that was packed with sensors, antenna farms and ports for weapons Kirk could not immediately identify. Three massive impulse engines dominated the rear of the ship, directly below a large pill-shaped module half-buried in the armored hull that probably contained a solitary warp engine. Everywhere along the hull, the ship was freckled with armored hatches for missile silos and gun turrets and whatever else the Cardassians kept hidden from the universe when they weren't in a fighting mood. Overall, Kirk thought the Grazine looked like a mechanical sperm whale with rockets attached to its fluke. God only knew what the Cardassians thought of the Enterprise.

"The ship's configuration is reminiscent of Shofixi patterns," Spock pointed out, sounding less than impressed, "At least, the external arrangement and shape. The Cardassians probably copied the basic design without fully understanding the philosophy behind it."

That, for sure, was a mouthful. In some ways, Shofixi spacecraft weren't ships as much as they were gigantic heavily shielded missiles launched from one solar system to another; the colonists hibernating aboard them were a biological payload whose only real weapons were their disarmingly cute appearance and ravenous appetite for the flesh of other sentient beings. "Run a tactical analysis," Kirk ordered at once. Not that he didn't trust Bailey's knowledge on the subject, but it was always best to make sure.

Spock ran a detailed scan for a few moments as the Grazine's attitude thrusters turned the bow towards "prograde" orientation, aimed towards the horizon along the present axis of their orbit. Naturally, it wouldn't stay that way; as both ships orbited the moon their un-changing orientation would be constantly changing with respect to the surface, and thirty eight minutes from now both ships would be hurtling through space with their bows pointed straight up away from the surface.

Finally, Spock reported, "Sensors cannot resolve the internal arrangement of their ship, Captain. Some type of energy field is severely degrading our instruments."

That was unexpected. Kirk filed that away for later. "Anything on a surface scan?"

"Grazine is armed with fifty two chemically-fueled missiles, explosive yield unknown but probably nuclear-tipped. Twenty six large caliber electromagnetic projectile weapons, estimated one point three isotons standard yield, ammunition capacity unknown. Multiple gamma ray laser emplacements, probably some type of point defense system. Power system, unknown."

Kirk nodded, relieved. "So far as we can see, nothing our shields couldn't hold off... how about their defenses?"

"In addition to their jamming devices, I am picking up several small canisters capable of deploying chaff constellations and decoy units..." Spock raised a brow, "And two RIM-3 phase cannons in a turret mounting near the bow."

Now _that_ was an interesting surprise, but not quite enough to make the Captain uneasy. The RIM-3 series was the first production-model phaser cannon ever produced, and after a short-lived heyday was deemed obsolete by the end of the Second Romulan War. Since then, it had become a staple of close-range defense for the Earth Cargo Service and various mercenary outfits that couldn't afford more effective weapons, although its cheaper successor - the RIM-4B - was also a common sight on some of the newer Boomers. Either weapon was still decades ahead of anything the Cardassians could have developed on their own, though, which in itself was somewhat worrying. "Have you translated their message, Lieutenant?" Kirk asked, turning to the comms. station.

Uhura nodded, though tentatively and not with total certainty, "They've stated a desire for direct face-to-face meeting aboard the Enterprise and have requested permission to dispatch a... well... either a shuttlepod or a parasite, the translator isn't sure which fits better."

"Grant permission in either case. We'll meet them in the shuttlebay in half an hour."

"Aye, Captain."

"Meanwhile," Kirk stood and gestured at the senior navigator, "Let's prepare to greet our guests, Mister Bailey. You're with me."

.

- 0822 hours -

Kirk had never _seen_ a Cardassian before, but from what he remembered of their profile they were reptilian bipeds, vaguely human-like in structure and stature, most notable for a cold-blooded metabolism, a delightfully rhythmic language that sounded poetic even to the untrained ear, and a peculiar haploid reproductive system that - according to rumors - made them capable of breeding with almost any other carbon-based life form in the galaxy. Novelty of their race aside, there was nothing novel about their uniforms and equipment, which were simple khaki-colored jumpsuits adorned with insignia and thick black boots that reminded Kirk of some old 20th century military garb. The five of them even carried sidearms at the hip, slug-throwers from the look of things; judging by their uniforms Kirk imagined they were the Cardassian equivalent of Colt .45s.

They had objected to the use of transporters partly out of a general phobia of the device (apparently lacking one of their own) but mostly because of the desire to see the Enterprise up close from one of their own shuttles. Watching them climb down the ladder from their vehicle, Kirk found the craft somewhat quaint, if not admirably utilitarian. Actually, it looked a bit like the old NASA lunar and Martian landers with its four spidery landing pads and cylindrical hull studded with heat-shield ballutes. It had even taken Uhura almost ten minutes just to convince them that they didn't need to bring spacesuits with them on the crossing; how these people ever made it into _deep_ space, Kirk could barely comprehend.

"According to our information, Captain," Lieutenant Bailey said softly from behind him, "One of the Cardassian nation-states, the Detapa Republic, obtained basic warp drive technology from a Shofixi dreadnought that landed off their coast fifty years ago. It took ten years and twenty million casualties to suppress the Shofixi invasion, but the fighting helped them form a powerful and very competent military institution. Afterwards, Detapa went on a violent and fortunately _brief_ campaign to establish global hegemony, and they've acted as the de facto world government for the past thirty five years. Their experience with alien cultures is pretty limited, in fact the Federation is the only alien power they have any _peaceful_ contact with."

Kirk asked, "Has there been a lot of _un_-peaceful contact?"

"Their region of space is pretty crowded. Apart from the Shofixi - who invaded them _again_ ten years ago - they're in close proximity to seven other warp-capable species, including the Breen, the Tzenkethi, the Ferengi and the Talarians. We've heard reports that one of their lunar outposts was attacked by Klingon raiders last year, and a few months ago one of their mining colonies was literally carried off by... _something_."

"Tough neighborhood," Kirk said as the last of the Cardassians finally disembarked from their craft, "Well it's a small galaxy, let's try to make a good first impression."

As all five stood beneath their craft's boarding ladder, their eyes turned to the surrounding shuttlebay and their faces opened into what must have been a Cardassian expression of awe. At a time like this the shuttlebay was hardly a hotbed of activity, but standing inside the cavernous miniature harbor gave a sense of robust purpose that perhaps the Cardassians weren't used to on anything other than a full-sized space station. "Gentlemen," Kirk greeted them to capture their wandering attention, "Welcome aboard. I'm Captain James T. Kirk from the United Federation of Planets, this is my senior navigator Lieutenant George Bailey." A second or two later, Kirk's communicator chanted a facsimile of his voice in extremely different words and inflections: _"Branous. Pardes thraval. Ligra Gul James T. Kirk, Ru'ta Botu Dentalla Likandes. Tes Gister Likandra Glyn George Bailey."_

One of the five - apparently the ranking officer - stepped forward, clicked his heels together and threw both arms high into the air. Kirk suppressed a chuckle; it reminded him of a Banzai salute from those old war movies hybridized with some kind of overdone tap-dancing movement. "Branous, Gul!"

_"Greetings, Captain!"_ rendered the translator as a strong, firm voice.

"Ligra Gul Dulek ta Dakan Grazine, ru'ta Detapa Bodrino..."

_"I am Gul Dulek of the space vessel Grazine, representing the Detapa Republic..."_

"E'tes rutas raskanous, Glyn Lynoi."

_"This is my first officer, Glyn Lynoi,"_ he gestured at a small, lightly-built female behind him, _"and my flight crew Gerin Jelad, Gerin Horan and Gerin Gamar. We've been sent here under orders from the our space probe service and I have been briefed on the overall situation."_

Kirk nodded, and carefully worded his response,"I appreciate your enthusiasm, but we're all friends here. No need to be so formal."

Once the translator related Kirk's words in Cardassian, Gul Dulek's entire body seemed to unclench itself from its absurdly rigid posture. He became an organism once again instead of a caricature of archaic military discipline. _"This ship of yours,"_ Dulek said, this time in a language subtly different from the one he'd used earlier, _"it's unbelievable!"_

Kirk smiled brightly. "She's only the second vessel of the Constitution-class, Our newest deep-space explorer."

_"My Grazine looks like a lifepod next to this monster."_ Dulek turned and looked back out to the enormous cavern that was the shuttlebay, _"It could almost fit inside of your hangar."_

"Well not quite, but..."

_"Your one vessel,"_ he gestured around him, _"could overpower our entire fleet!"_

Kirk got the sense that Dulek, for whatever reason, was laying on the flattery in anticipation of some special treatment later on. Maybe this was the way Cardassians made friends with new races, or maybe the alien Captain wanted to put Kirk in the frame of mind that the Cardassians were no threat to him at all. In either case, Kirk found himself looking at Dulek with even more suspicion than before. "Perhaps we could, but we _wouldn't_. Starfleet's primary role is peaceful exploration and scientific research. In fact, the Enterprise is designed to be self-sufficient for up to five years without a port call, and we have to be prepared for everything. We have factories, laboratories, workshops, foundries, even conservatory for animal and plant samples from the various worlds we visit."

_"Amazing!"_

Kirk gestured for Dulek and his men to follow, "If you'd like, Lieutenant Bailey has arranged to give a brief tour of the Enterprise's facilities."

_"We would like that very much, Captain. Thank you. My flight crew will remain here, if you don't mind."_

He gave the nod to Bailey, who took Gul Dulek and his science officer through the airlock and into the service corridor leading to the nearest turbolift. Bailey had planned that tour extremely carefully, Kirk knew, to give the Cardassians the best possible impression of the Enterprise's capabilities and what exactly it was designed for. This would include a brief overview of the engineering section, its various factory blocks and manufacturing machinery, the bussard collector and the main deflector dish, the fuel lab, the navigational control center, and ultimately up through the EVA complex in the neck of the ship to the living quarters and duty stations in the saucer section on their way - finally - to the officer's lounge where the briefing was scheduled to start in twenty five minutes.

It would give Kirk enough time to settle some other ship's business. Flipping open his communicator, he stepped into a turbolift and quickly queried of the computer, "Locator for Ensign Janice Rand."

The communicator's display screen printed out: Deck Six, Section 307. Upper recreation level on the starboard side, a place the crew had started calling the Clownface Cafe after the holographic bartender of the same name. He couldn't remember why the program was called Clownface, except for some obscure reference to a popular Phaserbrane song. He had never actually _been_ to Clownface Cafe, so he decided he had just enough time to have Rand show him around the place while he broke the good (or was it bad?) news to her.

The turbolift opened four seconds later to a corridor just around the corner from the Cafe. Kirk's untrained ear picked up the sound of a woman's voice singing in untranslated Japanese what - judging by the tempo - was probably a dubstep/space-angst love song. Assuming, of course, that the song was about anything at all; despite the best efforts of programmers, linguicode translators still couldn't properly account for the subtleties of wordplay and rhythm, so a growing number of singers - especially space-angst singers - composed lyrics by throwing random words together from a dozen languages just because they happened to rhyme. For a moment, then, Kirk made the mistake of leaving his translator on automatic mode and was briefly subjected to a fetching soprano voice singing "Fishing certificate, book girl birth remote, chicken wing table wall, letters falling man me do..." then he set the translator back on manual and went back to pretending the music was that of a Japanese love song.

The Cafe didn't quite dominate an entire compartment, it mainly conformed to the section of the pressure hull where the the five massive floor-to-ceiling windows looked out at the starboard nacelle and the desolation of Doppelgänger-B, spinning slowly a thousand kilometers below them. Most everyone was focussed on the source of the music - Lieutenant Hayase, if Kirk remembered the name right - but there was something else in the background that was gathering more and more attention until, once Kirk traced it to its origin, even the singer had to stop and stare as the computerized music dropped out for a moment. It looked like a brawl in progress, which curiously enough seemed to revolve around a single heavyset Nigerian who was in the progress of fighting off no less than six different people with his bare hands.

Janice Rand was just entering the fray now, along with two other security officers who had obviously been called here for exactly this situation. All three tackled the Nigerian as a singular force, slammed him to the ground and held him there. Kirk heard Rand shouting in desperation, "Onise, Calm the hell down before we have to h-" one of the security officers was propelled into the ceiling by some incredible force as, heartbeats later, Janice and the other officer were thrown over a table not far behind him. Lieutenant Onise leapt to his feet and took a powerful lunge at something. Two science officers moved to block his path, and both were immediately swatted out of his path with a single wave of his arm, like a pair of grass stalks in the path of a tractor. Someone in the path of this deranged officer screamed; Kirk recognized her as one of Uhura's communications officers... Ayala, was it?

Acting before thinking, the Captain drew his hand phaser and launched himself into the path of the officer-turned-maniac. He'd just begun to utter a single word of warning before Onise's fist slammed into his chest like a jousting lance. Kirk tumbled backwards over a cafe table and landed on his shoulders, and just as he scrambled back to his feet he heard the electronic pulse of a phaser in stun-mode. A pair of blue-white pulses tore into Onise's back from behind him, phaser energy rippling around his skin and stripping electrons from his central nervous system, first to trigger paralysis, then unconsciousness.

Impossibly, Onise didn't go down. Instead he whirled on the source of the phaser fire - Ensign Rand taking cover behind a cafe table - and bellowed an almost primal growl that barely pronounced the words "Kill on you! _Kill on you_!"

Kirk picked up his hand phaser, fixed the aiming laser on the base of Onise's spine and fired. The little pocket-knife-sized hand phaser let off a high pitched scream and a long continuous blue beam right into the small of Onise's back, just as Rand joined in with another brighter beam from her service pistol. Onise howled something unintelligible, then stiffened, and collapsed to the deck like a tree falling in a forest.

Things seemed calm now, but surveying the aftermath Kirk had to wonder seriously how all of this started. Nearly a dozen people were sitting, standing or lying around nursing bruises, cuts, scrapes, and - in the case of Ensign Ayala - a painful looking wound on the left bicep. "Are you alright, Ensign?" Kirk asked, helping her to her feet by her uninjured arm.

Ayala started to answer before she really knew who was asking. Once she recognized him, she transitioned between admiration and standoffishness half a dozen times in as many seconds before she finally settled on gratitude. "I'm fine, Sir. Could be worse."

"What happened here?" Kirk looked at the wound, dark blue Orion blood staining the arm of her otherwise red uniform.

"Onise and I haven't been getting along lately," Ayala began, apologetically, "It's a longstanding argument of ours... kind of petty really..."

"What _happened_?" Kirk asked again.

She shuddered, struggled to keep his composure, "I um... I'm not really sure..."

"What _are_ you sure about?"

"I was just sitting here, having a drink with Ensign Meaney, minding my own business, when all of a sudden Lieutenant Onise comes up and grabs me around the neck and pushes me down on the table. He... I think... I think he tried to rip my pants off."

Kirk's eyes widened. "Just so I'm clear... you two have no prior relationship in this context...?"

"Actually, we pretty much _hate_ each other, Sir. But then I scratched him in the face to try and get him off, and that's when he bit me."

Kirk looked at her wound now in astonishment, "He _bit_ you?"

Ayala nodded.

Not far away, Ensign Rand took this all in and made a snap decision. She flipped open her communicator and keyed it to the medical intercom channel, "Security to sickbay. I need a stretcher and some medics at the Clownface Cafe. Bring a tranquilizer."

"He's been acting weird all week, Captain," Meaney said, "I thought maybe he was just drunk, but he never seems to go back to normal, and he's getting worse."

Rand added to her communicator, "Sickbay, have a toxicology screening and a cerebral exam scheduled for Lieutenant Kembi Onise and forward those results to the security office as soon as they're ready."

Doctor McCoy answered, _"I'll run it as soon as he comes in, Rand, but you know confidentiality rules. I can't release the test results to anyone except the chief of security..."_

"Bones," Kirk leaned over her communicator, "Ensign Rand has been appointed acting Security Chief until further notice. She has full security clearance as of today."

_"Well... okay then. I'll have it for you in two hours, Chief. Sickbay out."_

Rand looked at Kirk with surprise and betrayal now, "Acting Security Chief?"

"Not really 'acting,' I'm making it official as of midnight night, authorizing a promotion to the rank of Lieutenant." Kirk started for the corridor to the turbolift and gestured for her to follow. The medical team passed them on the way in, carrying an antigrav stretcher.

"For how long? Doctor McCoy said it'll be _months_ before McCahil's fit for duty." she said, catching up to him as he pressed the controls to summon a turbolift.

"Even then, I doubt he'll be up to the job. Consider this a permanent appointment."

"You can't be serious!"

"Can't I?"

"Jim, c'mon, I am in _no way_ qualified to-"

"You didn't hesitate under fire, Janice," Kirk said as he stepped onto the turbolift, "and you kept your cool when going got rough, which is more than I can say for McCahil. Plus I like the way you handled Onise back there. Very impressive."

Recently-promoted _Lieutenant_ Janice Rand followed him, resisting the competing and paradoxical urges to kiss him and punch him in the nose. "What about Ensign Dallas? Or Lieutenant McKena? Or Lieutenant Badjarule? Or that creepy Russian guy with the eyepatch?"

"You need me to go down the list? McKenna has no hand-to-hand combat training, Badjarule's still on disciplinary for smoking cannabis on duty, and Doctor Loganoff - in addition to being partially blind in his one good eye - is a _civilian_. And I already asked Dallas, he turned down the position because he wants to transfer back to the sciences division."

"That coward..."

"In a nutshell," Kirk explained succinctly, "McCahil was a last minute replacement for someone a hell of a lot more qualified. Now McCahil's out, and you're the only one left who could fill those shoes. And the next person down the line... hell, there _is_ no one down the line, Janice, so I'm not giving you a choice!" Kirk punched the lift controls in the wall, keying a destination for Deck Three, section zero, near the command briefing room aft of the bridge.

Rand ground her teeth at him, "That is a _blatant_ violation of regulations, Jim!"

"You can file a complaint when we get back to a starbase."

"_Five years_ from now!"

"Yep. _Until_ then, effective immediately, you are now _Security Chief_ Janice Rand. And you may not like it much, but if you don't do this job there's a good chance we could all get killed out here, so just do the best you can until someone higher up the food chain overrules me."

Rand sighed, then straightened up at something like attention, "Yes, Sir, I'll do my best."


	19. Chapter 19

**TRANSFORMATION**

Doppelgänger-B Orbit  
USS Enterprise (NCC-1701)  
Stardate 2261.3.6

- 0942 hours -  
The turbolift opened to Deck Three at the semi-circular corridor just aft of the bridge. Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Rand followed the curving passageway around to the command briefing room where Doctor Marcus, Spock and Doctor McCoy were already gathered at the conference table, along with a newly-arrived pair of Cardassian officers just now entering through the opposite hatch with Lieutenant Bailey bringing up the rear.

Kirk stopped and took them in for a moment, giving his newly anointed Security Chief some time to get comfortable with her sudden authority. Gradually the entire group took their seats around the long table; Spock took his customary station at the library computer terminal, and all seats around the table were arranged facing a circular bank of HUD windows, designed to display information without compromising the line of sight between any two seats. Kirk spoke first, as he knew he was expected to, "Gentlemen," he said, addressing the Cardassians first, "How was the tour?"

"Enlightening, Kirk," said Gul Dulek, this time by way of a universal translator Lieutenant Uhura had programmed and clipped to his breast pocket. Now at least Kirk could hear a rendition of his voice in standard English through his own earpiece, although he still had to adjust to Dulek's lips moving totally out of synch with his words, "This ship is _very_ impressive. We were told ahead of time that your vessels are equipped with artificial gravity devices, but to be honest I'd expected this was an exaggeration."

Kirk chose his words carefully, not wanting to offend, "Actually, I was impressed with your Grazine when I first saw it. It's a surprisingly large vessel for a ship with no gravity control. I imagine it takes a bit of technical ingenuity to solve the microgravity problem, especially during combat maneuvers."

Dulek suddenly seemed uncomfortable. "Well... actually, the Grazine's current mission is exploratory. Our orders are to _avoid_ combat whenever possible. Which is only prudent, considering our limited defensive capabilities." He was choosing his words equally well; that sentence took almost two seconds longer to finish in Cardassian than the translation let on.

"I know the feeling." Of course, he didn't mention the anomalous fact that a black-market phase cannon wasn't totally consistent with that mission, considering the number of seedy connections the Detapa government would have had to cultivate in order to purchase such a thing.

Glancing around, Kirk spread the focus of his attention to the remainder of the room and began, officially, "Anyhow, Dulek, we're extremely eager to have a look at your findings. We weren't expecting your government to send a whole _ship_ to deliver them, but the fact that you are here suggests you turned up something interesting."

"You could say that, Captain." Gul Dulek gestured to his science officer, who retrieved an encapsulated silver disk from his sleeve pocket and handed it over to Spock. The Cardassian government had transmitted the specs for their computer systems over subspace days earlier, and Spock and Scotty had spent the last four hours rigging a disk-drive adaptor for the Enterprise's computer and the Cardassian data disks. It was into this adaptor that the disk was fed, and Spock went to work hammering out any compatibility differences and formatting the information in time to display it on the monitors, seconds later, as a programmed presentation briefing.

"Astonishing!" Gul Dulek came half out of his chair, "You were even able to preserve our system's formatting!"

Spock almost smiled. "I have simply programmed equivalent formatting into this computer terminal. It is _logically_ identical to your native configuration."

Glyn Lynoi rasped, briefly in that whimsical sing-song Cardassian language before the translator kicked in, "How could you do that so quickly? It would take an entire team of programmers with access to the source code-"

"Mister Spock is the foremost authority in computer science aboard the Enterprise," Kirk said with a note of pride, "and as a Vulcan, he is trained in high-level logical analysis."

Gul Dulek squinted, "A Vulcan... you are not _Human_?"

"I am half Vulcan. My mother was Human."

Gul Dulek was about to comment further when Doctor Ayash interrupted on the ship's intercom, _"Security Chief, please report to sickbay. Code blue, urgent."_

A dark cloud suddenly flooded the room, hanging over the heads of the Starfleet officers - and Lieutenant Rand in particular - knowing that "code blue" indicated that someone on the ship was either dead or dying and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

Rand snapped into her communicator, "I'm on my way," and then nodded apologetically to the Captain and swept out of the room like a humanoid breeze.

"If you care to continue, Dulek," Kirk said, salvaging the meeting from any further derails.

"Yes, of course..." and turning to the monitors Dulek announced, "Stage one, begin playback."

The image on the monitors became a split-screen, four separate frames dividing the screen, one showing a navigational plot of the Grazine's position, another showing numerical scrolls of raw un-processed sensor data, another showing a multi-colored, multi-line graph of spectral analysis, and the last showing an extreme range telescope view of the system that now contained the Enterprise, the Grazine, and the so-far unnamed Gorn trawler. "Our first reading was taken from these coordinates, a position at one hundred sixty one light years distance. We were able to identify the planet," as he said this, the telescope image adjusted and panned, slowly and haltingly as if under manual control, until it settled finally on Doppelgänger and its two Class-D moons. "Visual observation shows an oxygen nitrogen atmosphere, equatorial diameter of approximately twelve thousand seven hundred kilometers, gravitational flux at eight point one meters per second. Average surface temperature of approximately two hundred and eighty kelvins."

"Identical to the planet as it is now," Kirk said.

Spock shook his head, "The gravitational attraction is almost twenty percent lower. I am not sure how to account for that discrepancy... except possibly instrument error."

Dulek shook his head, "We thought so too, but we double checked using diffraction measurements of nearby stars. The gravitational flux is lower at this time, but maybe more relevantly, distant observations showed circumstantial evidence of a subspace field surrounding the planet."

"Circumstantial?"

Glyn Lynoi said, "We determined the planet was generating an electromagnetic field between five and eight hundred thousand gauss. With proper modulation, a field of that intensity could easily produce a subspace differential."

"Thereby reducing the effective mass of the planet," Doctor Marcus said, "Lowering its gravity."

Kirk asked, "Why would anyone need to lower the planet's mass? It's not as if it was being moved anywhere..."

"We think it may have been accidental," Gul Dulek said, "Or, that is to say, a consequence of the planet's formation. Speaking of which," and to the computer he said, "Stage two, continue playback."

The screen images all changed at once. The timestamp in the corner showed this second set of readings was taken two days later, and again the image panned and zoomed until it finally identified Doppelgänger.

Only it wasn't Doppelgänger, at least not yet. The object on screen now was a Class-E "hothouse" world surrounded by a thick greenish yellow cloud layer and intermittent flashes of high altitude lightning. "At a distance of one hundred and sixty nine point two light years. Spectral analysis indicates an oxygen-methane atmosphere prone to spontaneous combustive episodes, and a hydrosphere containing high concentration of phosphoric acids. Visual observation gave an equatorial diameter of roughly eight thousand kilometers with a gravitational flux of twenty six point two meters per second, average surface temperature of three hundred and ninety kelvins. There's _some_ evidence of life forms, but our sensors aren't designed to take those kinds of readings from a distance. We also identified two oddities: firstly, the the planet's orbit at this time is about twenty million kilometers closer to the star than it is today, and secondly, that at this time the planet had _three_ moons, the outermost being highly geologically active. Obviously, the absence of the third moon presents a bit of a mystery."

Lieutenant Bailey asked, "How sure are you that this is the same planet?"

"We surveyed the entire system and visually confirmed all ten major planets in their proper orbits. Doppelgänger was the only anomaly. We even checked twelve nearby dwarf planets just to be certain. Of course, at that distance it's still possible we were in error."

"In any case," Spock says, "this is a revealing development, since no planet similar to the one you observed currently exists in this solar system."

Dulek smiled, "We haven't even gotten to the best part... Stage eight, continue playback."

The image changed three times in rapid succession, each time pausing for a few seconds to show an extremely abbreviated summary of the long-range sensor findings. "We made several warp jumps at one light-year intervals," Dulek explained, "basically, observing the planet one year at a time. After one of our jumps, we lost track of the planet and picked it up again in its transformed state, almost identical to our first observation, so we backtracked by three months, then three more, then forward again by four weeks... and so on. Finally we were in the right position and our telescopes recorded _this_." The final stage began, with Grazine's telescopes zeroing in on the Class-E world with its bands of poisonous oceans and toxic atmosphere.

But even before the telescope could zoom in, something else was already in the frame. It was moving quickly - at the scale of the image, much too quickly to be anything but a warp driven space vessel. At this distance, identification would be impossible; even at the highest resolution of Starfleet telescopes it would have appeared as little more than a fast-moving pinprick that was only visible because it was moving faster than light. But as they watched the recording, that singular point of light assumed a heading directly into the northern hemisphere of the greenish-yellow world and slammed through its thick atmosphere without even slowing down. A titanic burst of energy rippled out from the impact site, followed by an expanding madness of orange and yellow streamers as if the entire planet had been coated with thermonuclear warheads all detonating in sequence.

"What am I looking at?" Kirk asked, as the glowing fiery effect slowly enveloped the entire planet.

"We don't know at this point, but our sensor logs suggest it might be a t-"

"Material transformation," Doctor Marcus answered breathlessly, staring at the frame that contained the raw unprocessed telemetry data, "the _entire planet _is being transformed at the subatomic level! I've never seen anything like it!"

"What could cause that?" Kirk asked.

Marcus stood up and leaned half over the table, freezing the playback and maximizing the sensor readouts on the screen, "The readings are fuzzy from this distance," she said, "But the energy signature reads like... almost like a thousand small transporter signals all overlapping."

Kirk looked at the monitor himself, baffled, "Where do you see _that_?"

"I believe Doctor Marcus is correct," Spock added, watching the presentation on his own monitor. After a moment he resumed the playback and manually highlighted the data fields relevant to both of them. They were just gibberish to everyone else in the room, but simultaneously Spock, Marcus and Glyn Lynoi all shared an expression of wonderment. "It's as if the planet is being dismantled and reconstructed by an enormous matter replicator."

Doctor McCoy asked, "Now wait a minute, didn't one of you say something about how this would require some kind of giant machine? Like a planet-sized transporter?"

"Evidently not," Marcus said, too lost in her amazement to care about any past theories. "Back it up a minute or so, mister Spock... look at the spectral pattern at the blast site."

"When?"

"At forty five through sixty... you see it?"

Spock did, and then raised both eyebrows, "Fascinating. The planet's atmosphere has been converted into gaseous carbon and helium, with rapidly increasing levels of oxygen and nitrogen."

"Fusion transmutation?" Lynoi said.

"Energy output is too low. Possibly rankine-cancelation or muon-catalyzed transmutation..."

Kirk interrupted the scientific spectacle with a terse, "We can leave the details for later. What I most need to know right now is what kind of technology could cause all that to happen. Obviously, by the time this process is complete, the planet transforms into what it is now..."

"As I have surmised," Spock said, "based on the composition of the artifact at stonehenge, the most likely culprit is a type of sophisticated phased-matter process."

Lynoi looked at him as he if he'd just invoked the existence of God. "I beg your pardon?"

"It is a concept widely in use by our technology, sometimes called photonics or programmable energy," Spock explained, "It is known to _your_ science in the field of quantum process physics, what your people currently regard as a fringe theory. In principle, it describes a method of using standing-wave energy patterns to produce coherent structures with a set of behaviors. Our transporter beams, for example, can deconstruct an object at the subatomic level and encapsulate its constituent molecules into energized capsules, composed of electrons and virtual photons, which are themselves programmed with an assembly matrix that will allow them to re-construct the transported object in a specific location of the operator's choosing."

Gul Dulek smiled, "Sounds like nanorobotics. You program millions of tiny robots to take something apart, then go somewhere and put that thing back together in a new location."

"Conceptually, yes," Spock nodded, "Except the so-called 'robots' in this case are themselves created from programmed photonic energy transmitted as a phased-matter particle beam, which is under indirect control by the transporter operator. Our primary weapons employ a similar principle, using phased-matter particles called nadions."

Glyn Lynoi looked incredulous, "How could that _possibly_ be true? I mean... building atoms out of _photons_?"

"Virtual photons and electrons," Spock corrected, "And not atoms, per se, but virtual particles whose existence is merely the intersection of multiple controlled energy fields. The process allows for apparently solid materials to be fabricated out of pure energy in some arbitrary form, such as a wall or a protective dome. The applications for the process are numerous, but phased matter cannot exist for more than a few seconds at a time without an external energy source."

"I've never heard of anything like this before..."

"The details of these processes can be made available from our library computer if you so desire."

"I _do_ desire, Mister Spock. I won't believe a word of this until I see it myself."

"Theoretically, you've _already_ seen it yourself," Doctor Marcus said with a gesture to the viewscreen, where the once-toxic Doppelgänger was already beginning to stabilize from an unnatural orange glow until something vaguely Earth-like. "Although, with a caveat, I might disagree with Mister Spock in one aspect. Gul Dulek mentioned nanorobotics... _that_ seems more consistent with what we're seeing here."

Now it was Spock's turn to look incredulous, "Doctor McCoy earlier made mention of your hypothesis to this effect. What is your basis for it, Doctor Marcus?"

"Storing a completed pattern for phased-matter duplication would require an enormous database and an inconceivable amount of power. You'd have to harness the total output of a blue giant just to support a process like that."

Spock caught the reference with growing interest, "The Helios Device."

"Exactly! But what we see here..." Marcus shook her head, "This is a radically different approach. See, if I wanted to reduce the hardware requirements, one of the ways I might do that is a kind of self-organizing data matrix, maybe some kind of fractal algorithm for data compression. Phased-matter processes don't perform well in fractals, but quantum computers _do_, especially in nanoscale. So the device that struck the planet... it's not a giant device to do the job, but billions of _tiny_ devices each doing a microscopic part of the job, like bees constructing a hive. I think what we're probably seeing is the effect of a swarm of nanorobots, each equipped with a tiny phased-matter device. They're probably programmed to make use of the planet's structure for raw materials and rearrange it to a specific pattern."

Spock thought about this for a moment, "Such an endeavor would require an _alarming_ number of nanoscale devices..."

"Ultimately, yes," Marcus said, "But you could _start_ the process with just a handful if they were self-replicating. Like a Von Neuman device or something, maybe cannibalizing part of the planet to make more of themselves. We don't know what they're using for an energy source, but whatever it is, it's obviously powerful enough to propel a small vessel to warp velocities. That should be enough for the initial boost."

"Indeed..." Spock nodded, slowly conceding defeat, "They may be powered, or even controlled, by subspace differentials or electromagnetic fields... if that is true, then the energy emissions from our own sensors may have reactivated some of the constructor devices on the surface, perhaps triggering a malfunction in the construction process... Captain, it has just occurred to me that, if those devices are still present in Ensign Hallab's body, it may also explain the incident in the transporter room when we tried to beam her aboard. Her original pattern briefly manifested before the nanomachines present in her body restored the humanoid facade..."

"This is all very interesting, Spock," Kirk said, quickly terminating what had already mutated into a scientific brainstorming session, "But we're overlooking two very simple things. Firstly, the entire system is in a different orbit than it was at the time of this recording. Second... well, I don't mean to be dense, but what the hell happened to the third moon?"

"That," Gul Dulek said, "is where this recording gets interesting."

As if it wasn't interesting enough, Kirk thought. But then Dulek's prediction became true: the recording backtracked to a point slightly before the transformation of Doppelgänger, this time focussing on the turbulent third moon. As before, a small object was shown racing towards that moon at superluminal velocities; a flash of light in the background indicated the beginning of Doppelgänger's transformation, and moments later the moon was struck as well, undergoing the same fame. "We almost overlooked this second event," Dulek said, "But the spectral pattern of the impactor is identical to the one that hit the planet. The transformation pattern, however, is _very_ different." The recording showed this as well: for the second time the expanding blaze consumed yet another world, but this time more quickly than before, spreading fast until the volatile third moon stabilized into a cold dense sphere of brightly-shining material. "According to spectral analysis," Dulek concluded, "The third moon is now encased in a layer of iridium at least five kilometers thick, interlaced with other compounds our sensors could not identify."

"Kemocite," Spock said, looking at the sensor data, "And large amounts of Trellium and Verterium allotropes. All three are common in warp propulsion systems."

Kirk took a moment to absorb this as he watched the recording. A moon that size, instantly transformed into a pile of valuable resources. Just _one_ of the Enterprise's warp engine nacelles cost as much as a Saladin-class scout ship; this transformed moon could provide building materials for a _million_ Enterprises and still have resources to spare.

"We fixed our telescope on it for a few hours, and then..." the recording skipped this interval also, transitioning to a moment only seconds before the now-silent moon suddenly lit up with a galaxy of swirling blue lights, as if a million highways suddenly lit up with traffic for a million city-sized vehicles.

"What's all that?" Marcus asked.

"The moon is generating some type of force field," Spock said, and watching the sensor data added, "Am I reading your telemetry correctly, Gul Dulek? It appears to be towing the entire system into a higher orbit."

Gul Dulek nodded, "It's a type of tractor field we've never seen before. Power levels are beyond measurement, but our observations record that the Doppelgänger system was moved into a higher orbit over the course of just seventy five hours. After that..." the now-transformed third moon released its hold on its former siblings, then moved out of its once-stable orbit and raced off into the distance, leaving a rainbow-colored after image in its path. Though it didn't seem to be moving that quickly, the telltale splash of the Tachyon Effect indicated that it was moving somewhat faster than the speed of light.

"Did the moon just go to warp?" Marcus asked.

"Yes it did," Dulek said, "Or, at least what _was_ a moon, until whoever-they-are got to it. We think they may have used the same material transformation process to rebuild the third moon into a gigantic space vessel."

"A vessel..." Kirk drummed his fingers on the table, grasping an implication he hadn't considered earlier. It made perfect sense: why transform the entire moon into a stack of _raw_ materials when you could just as easily transform it into a finished product?

For the moment, Kirk brought their attention back to the monitor, "Doctor Marcus, your theory is that Doppelgänger and its third moon were rearranged by a swarm of... what? Microscopic robots equipped with fabrication equipment?"

"It's just a hypothesis, Captain," Marcus shrugged, "For all we know, it could have been Jesus."

"But it does partially fit the facts, Captain," Spock added, "At the very least, the radiative emissions from our engines could result in the time-slip effect we observed, especially if the constructor devices were spurred into undesired action _by_ those emissions. The Gorn arrival several years ago may have had a similar effect that resulted in the planet's instability..."

"And the people too," Kirk said, and suddenly a thought occurred to him, "But it can't be radiation alone. Our engines and sensors have had no further effect on the survivors from the surface, or even the reavers for that matter. Bones, you said the effect only lasts while they're on to the planet?"

"And in Miri's case, brief return _to_ the planet might account for the transformation when she was beamed back aboard. Who knows what those things are programmed to do under those circumstances?"

"A nanorobot formation would probably operate using swarm intelligence, Captain," Spock added, "separating a small portion of them from the remainder of the group would undoubtedly diminish their operating capacity to an extremely low level. In Miri's case, returning her to the planet may have allowed them to briefly reestablish their network, and her sudden separation from it probably resulted in what we might call a 'reboot' of her molecular structure."

"Well, that's possible, but mainly I'm wondering..." Kirk hesitated for a moment. The implications were starting to turn bitter, "Doctor Marcus, suppose Miri's still carrying those little robots around. It should be possible to isolate a few of them for study, don't you think? I mean," he glanced at Spock, "This could be that unknown factor you mentioned, the difference between the Onlies and the reavers we brought back. It might be that the children still have active units operating inside them while the reavers have been fully isolated from the swarm."

"Isolated..." something dark passed through Spock's features and he added, "Or _discarded_."

"Spock?"

"Captain, we've established that Miriam Hallab is one of the original inhabitants of the planet, but transformed - body and mind - into a human being. She was beginning to degenerate into a Reaver when she was discovered in Gaza. But when we beamed back aboard from Stonehenge..."

McCoy's eyes widened, "She arrived her original form, but the machines turned her _back_ into a human."

Spock nodded, "We also know that all of their memories prior to about twelve years ago have been falsified. Yet the planet has existed in this form for one hundred and sixty five years."

"And what's been happening down there for the other hundred and fifty years?" Kirk also nodded as he saw what Spock was getting at, "So this is all some kind of huge experiment, and the Onlies are..." he winced at the unintentional pun, "The _only_ active test subjects."

"This can be verified," Spock went on, "If we can determine for sure the presence of nanomachines in Miri's body and the _absence_ of machines in the reavers, we will have established this fact for certain."

Doctor McCoy straightened up a bit, "I'm not really sure how to go about determining that, Jim. If Doctor Marcus is right, those machines could be extremely small, maybe even molecule-sized. We can't search for something that small unless we have some idea what they're _made_ of, what kinds of molecules they contain. If they're made of the same phased-matter quasi-substance as that platform on the surface, then we'll have a hell of a time just identifying their presence, let alone studying them."

"And again," Spock said, "it is only an hypothesis. We do not even know for sure that there is anything within the Ensign's body for us to find."

"I might be able to help you with that." Marcus punched up something on a palmcomp, and a prompt appeared on the monitor for an indexed file being pushed electronically from Marcus' unit. Spock opened the file, and the Cardassian splitscreen was replaced by a similar but differently formatted playback, one showing security video footage from the transporter room, the other three showing energy readouts from the main transporter sensor. It was a playback of the away team's emergency beamout where the transformed Ensign Hallab first appeared on the pad. The blackened apparition that materialized behind Kirk and Rand looked so totally alien as to be utterly unrecognizable, but Marcus' focus was on one of the sensor readouts: a gyrating line graph labelled _space-energy flux_. "Just before Miri beamed back aboard," Marcus said, "The transporter sensor registered a very brief disturbance in the subspace Z-Band. It only lasted a few seconds, but the pattern had modulation characteristics that, at least to me, looked artificial. Mister Conrad thinks it might be a transmission from that alien artifact, maybe instructions to Miri's nanomachines to execute the program Doctor McCoy observed. If this is true th-"

"Doctor Marcus," Spock paused the recording, and by the sound of his voice something very unsettling had just crossed his mind, "This would appear to be a duplicate copy of the transporter diagnostic log."

Marcus nodded. "Of course it is."

"How did you obtain this?"

"I uh... downloaded it myself. Why do you ask?"

"With whose security clearance?"

Kirk bristled, now that it occurred to him - just as it moments ago occurred to Spock - that the operational transporter logs weren't generally accessible to science-division personnel without direct action by one of the ship's department heads.

Marcus raised a brow, "I didn't get any clearance. I didn't think it was necessary."

"Then am I to understand you gained access to this transporter log by circumventing the computer's security protocols? By, I presume, enlisting the services of Mister Conrad?"

"Who's Mister Conrad?" Kirk asked.

"Doctor Glenn Conrade, graduate of Cal Tech, with advanced degrees in subspace harmonics and information warfare, presently working towards a PhD in cryptanalysis. He is also a close personal friend and colleague of Doctor Marcus." Spock looked at her in what - for anyone other than a Vulcan - would have been a threatening glare, "You circumvented our security protocols to access this data?"

Marcus looked apologetic, but undisturbed. "Didn't think anyone would mind."

"You thought wrong, Doctor," Kirk said, and immediately snapped open his communicator, "Lieutenant Rand, you're needed in the briefing room."

_"Already on my way, Captain."_

"Oh, bloody hell..."

"Doctor..."

"You're really calling the cops on me? For this?" Marcus rolled her eyes, "Don't be thick, Captain. Because of this, we have a real chance of identifying the actual mechanism behind the alien transformation techn-"

"Because of this," Kirk corrected her, "the security of this ship may have been jeopardized. There's a reason diagnostic subroutines require command authorization, Carol. We've already had one conversation today about following proper protocols."

"It's no big deal, Jim! It's just the transporter logs!"

"And you _should_ have gone through proper channels to obtain them."

"Look, Captain," Marcus drummed her fingers on the table, "This transformation technology isn't fundamentally beyond anything the Federation has _now_. I mean, the basic principles are simple..."

"Doctor, y-"

"Do you not understand what a Von Neuman machine is? We can make something like that with our own technology. Imagine if you programmed an industrial fabricator to scoop some of the regolith off the lunar surface and use that material to make a copy of itself. You'd have two fabricators, then four, then eight... in a few days, you'd have a million of them. With a million fabricators you could transform the moon into anything you wanted, you could transform dead rocks into fertile soil, you could turn sand into oxygen, you could even..."

The briefing room doors opened and Lieutenant Rand entered the room with along with two additional security officers. She'd come here, obviously, under the assumption that the two Cardassians were making trouble; at the sight of Doctor Marcus' body language, she realized it was actually much worse than this.

"Lieutenant," Kirk began with a dismissive scowl, "Escort Doctor Marcus to the brig."

"The _brig_?! What?!" Marcus stood up, but the two security officers were already herding her towards the door, "Captain, please, don't do this! I didn't intend any of-" the briefing room doors closed behind them, leaving only silence and a frustrated-looking Lieutenant Rand in her absence.

"She may be right, you know," Glyn Lynoi added, ever so cautiously, "Our sensors _also_ detected a subspace anomaly that matches the pattern in your transporter logs. That might have been some sort of alien control signal..."

"She was almost certainly right about that," Spock said, "She was, however, seriously in error as far as her methodology-"

"She put her own personal curiosity over the security of the Federation," Kirk said, and then turned and glared at him, "And you of all people know the penalty for treason, Mister Spock."

Spock stared back at him for a long moment, searching the Captain's expression for clues. After half a second, he nodded slowly and answered, "I am not looking forward to another public execution."

"Hopefully, she'll make a strong enough example that this will be the last time." Kirk turned to the three Cardassians, who were making a very strong and almost successful effort not to look absolutely mortified. He smiled pleasantly as if they'd just been discussing the weather, "I can't thank you enough for your help, Gul Dulek. Once again, we're happy to share with you some study materials about phased-matter physics if it'll help you understand the theory behind this technology. Although..." he knew he shouldn't, but he was tempted to add, "Considering the armaments on your ship, it seems you're already familiar with the subject."

Gul Dulek squinted at him, "Armaments?"

"Your vessel _is_ equipped with a phase cannon, is it not?"

"How could you know that?" Dulek's eyes widened.

"Oh, don't worry about it. We'll adjourn for now. In the mean time, you're welcome to stay aboard as long as you like. Mister Bailey will see to your needs."

"Ah... thank you, Captain, for your hospitality." Unhappily, Gul Dulek rose from the table and followed Lieutenant Bailey out of the room. He had the look of a man - well, a Cardassian - who did not like being one-upped by a potential enemy, or even a potential ally.

That was admirable, on some level. Cardassians, like many humans, seemed to have a natural distaste for ever being at a disadvantage.

With only Starfleet personnel left in the room, Kirk turned to Lieutenant Rand, still standing unhappily behind Doctor Marcus' Chair, "Once the Cardassians are gone, have Doctor Marcus confined to quarters for the duration of this mission. I'm putting a formal reprimand in her file."

"Yes, Sir," Rand said, then, "Capt-"

"What was _that_ all about, Jim?" McCoy asked, "I thought you were loosing it for a minute."

Kirk frowned, slightly angry at the need for the performance at all, "That Gul Dulek's been shuckin' and jivin' ever since he came aboard. He wants us to think he's awe struck and intimidated by the Enterprise. But he's _way_ too smooth with it. He's like used car salesman or something."

McCoy frowned, "Could be he just rubs you the wrong way..."

"No, he did the same thing for me," Bailey put in, grimly, "He said something about how our computer systems were so advanced and he wished the Grazine had that level of automation. It's a weird comment considering the Grazine is flying with an evolved AI."

Spock raised a brow, "_Is_ it?"

"It's another hand-me-down from the Shofixi. In every _other_ measure they're over a century behind us, but their _computers_ are at least as good as ours. Up to ninety percent of the Grazine's internal functions are fully automated, and there's Gul Dulek going on and on how impressed he is with our automation."

"He's assuming we know nothing about them," Spock added, "And he wants to leave us to believe that they are harmless and primitive."

Scotty laughed, "And you want _them_ to believe that you're a hardass who executes people on a whim."

Rand started again, "Sir, there is a-"

"I want them to believe that double-crossing us might have some serious consequences. That will be useful when the time comes. Speaking of which, Rand," he turned to his newly-appointed security chief, "Have a team go over the shuttle bay after the Cardassians leave. Make sure they didn't leave any nasty surprises for later."

"Yes, Sir. Also-"

"You suspect the Cardassians are planning a subterfuge?" Spock asked, slightly alarmed.

"Subterfuge?" Kirk frowned, "I think they're planning to _kill us_ the moment cooperation isn't to their advantage. That's why they came all the way over here instead of transmitting their findings remotely. They know what this is about and they're after the same thing we are..." then he shook his head, grinning, "And I've just realized that in relation to our Gorn friends out there... Francium's orbit commander must have figured it out too. I don't know why we didn't see it sooner."

"See what?" McCoy asked.

"The technology that created this planet... I think Carol's got it right. The technology _itself_ isn't that exotic, it's just a question of technique. The Gorn want to be the first to discover it, and obviously so do the Cardassians." He grinned to himself but refrained from saying aloud, _So does Carol Marcus._

Scotty chuckled, "Bloody chance of that. Those laddies are still decades away from developing their own _transporters_."

"If they bother to _develop_ them," Kirk said, "The Cardassians obtained warp drive by reverse engineering an alien space craft, and they probably obtained phase cannons form the Orion Syndicate or God knows who else. I'm guessing they're planning to speed up their entry onto the galactic stage by getting a corner on this whole planeteering thing. And still, with all of that, there's the question of whatever the hell it was that Miri fired at down on the surface. We thought at the time those might have been Gorn scouts, but who knows what that was? It's likely there's _at least_ one other party involved that hasn't openly revealed itself."

"So it's a competition," Bailey said, "A good old fashion space race..."

"Captain!" Lieutenant Rand, raised her voice over the others, an outburst that commanded attention just by virtue of its being totally unprecedented from what used to be the captain's yeoman, "I have just been informed that Lieutenant Onise has a malignant tumor in his brain. _That_'s what was causing his erratic behavior. Doctor Ayash extracted a piece of for analysis... it's _definitely_ reaver tissue."

"Son of a-!" without another word, Doctor McCoy was out of his chair and out the door on his way to sickbay, almost running the security chief over on his way.

Kirk nodded. And then he rubbed his temples as his head started to throb, "So what _else_ can go wrong today?"

_"Bridge to Captain Kirk,"_ sounded Lieutenant Uhura in the ship's intercom circuit, paging the conference room specifically instead of the entire ship as normal.

Sighing, Kirk punched the intercom button, "Kirk here."

_"Long range sensors have detected a vessel approaching Doppelgänger at warp speed. ETA, eight minutes, twenty seconds. There are no other vessels expected at this time."_

"I had to ask." Kirk sighed once again and stood painfully from the conference room chair, "Uhura, sound yellow alert, and have Lieutenant Bailey escort our Cardassian guests back to their ship."


	20. Chapter 20

**MISTAKEN IDENTITY**

Doppelgänger-B Orbit  
USS Enterprise (NCC-1701)  
Stardate 2261.3.6

- 0950 hours -  
Spock relieved Ensign Garcia at the science console without so much as a word. The junior science officer slipped over to the auxiliary station with all due relief, happy to no longer have the responsibility of being the ship's eyes and ears in the face of potential combat.

Kirk, likewise, took the Captain's chair as the bridge hummed with activity for the second time in as many days, and waited for Lieutenant Rand to find her way to the standing security console next to the communications station before asking, "Readiness status."

"All sections report condition yellow," Rand said.

"Tactical status."

Sulu reported immediately, "Forcefields energized, main deflectors on standby. Number two shield is a bit twitchy, but all systems show ready. Should I arm phasers banks?"

"Not yet..." He had a million more questions to ask of the situation, but first things first, "Rand, where are the Cardassians?"

Checking her status board on one of the HUD windows, Rand reported, "Their shuttle is still finishing pre-flight checks, they'll be departing momentarily."

"Tell Gul Dulek to put a rush on it, and give him clearance as soon as he's ready."

After several minutes, a jittering alarm sounded on Spock's science console. A moving indicator on the overhead monitor that had been showing the target's position flickered erratically, as if the computer was suddenly confused as to where exactly the contact was. Spock reported, "We've lost sensor contact, Captain. The alien vessel may have dropped out of warp."

"Long range scan. Let's try to identify them before they move on us."

Spock switched over to the telescope screen, his eyes illuminated by displays from the scope hood. A tentative reading did appear on his scanners, but only for an instant before he moved back to the larger gravitic sensor display of the science console, "Vessel has gone to warp again. Moving towards the planet at warp factor one point..." and then the screen flickered, "Dropped out of warp in high orbit. Estimating five hundred thousand kilometers distance."

"Long range scans in that region, Mister Chekov."

"Scanning, Keptin..." Chekov's navigational sensors were, in some ways, more precise than the scientific instruments slaved to the library computer. Spock's sensors were designed to use a more narrow beam, condensing details from the subtle vapors of nuance that an ordinary beam of electromagnetic and electrogravitic energy could discern. But the navigational array had a simpler task: scan the heavens to find a particular object and then figure out what that object looked like. In this mode, even with the brief time delay from the sensors, the main viewer suddenly flickered with the magnified overlay of the distant craft as it emerged from the rainbow-colored plume of a warp drive distortion. A sleek, long-necked space craft with a bulbous command module and a flat, almost aerodynamic engineering section.

That unmistakeable silhouette that was the stuff of every cadet's nightmares. "Wisual identification," Chekov said, "Klingon warbird! Type D7!"

Which was, in fact, exactly what Captain Kirk was hoping the intruder would _not_ turn out to be. Rumors outnumbered real intelligence about the new warbird's capabilities, except it was generally accepted that the D7 was the one thing in space that was _guaranteed_ to outgun any ship in Starfleet. "Red alert! Shields up!"

And for the seventh time in two days, the lighting on the bridge plunged into deep red as the entire ship suddenly transformed into an instrument of war: no longer ready to merely respond to an attack, but ready to actively seek out and challenge any potential threat in the sky.

"Phaser banks fully charged, torpedo bays loaded," Sulu reported, passing on the reports from the weapons officers at the ops stations in front of him.

"Deflectors actiwated, Keptin!"

"Grazine's shuttlepod has docked, the Cardassians are moving away at full impulse power," Spock reported.

The ship's main deflectors began to audibly power up at the Captain's order, channeling full warp power to generate a type of subspace field that would repel any incoming particle more energetic than a sunbeam. Like the warp drives that were a part of their function, the deflector screens took some time to build up to full power, but once they were fully energized they could repel the force of a dozen phaser blasts even from the most powerful Klingon battlewagons.

But no one knew for sure what the D7's armaments were. Rumors had floated around that the latest generations of Klingon warships were being fitted with heavy phaser cannons that rivaled even the Enterprise's main batteries. So far, no one had had an opportunity to test those rumors for truth; all the top-of-the-line Klingon warships had so far totally avoided any contact with Starfleet vessels and the few independent warlords that even bothered to harass Federation positions invariably used designs that were showing their age a century ago. Enterprise had been upgraded and enhanced for its five-year mission, but it was anyone's guess if that would be enough to go toe to toe with the Empire's finest.

"Klingon vessel has gone to warp again, Captain," Spock reported, and a moment later added, "It seems to be on a direct course for-"

Through the overlay of the magnified image, a flash of rainbow-colored light indicated the arrival of the Klingon warship, not in a holographic image or a sensor display, but through the actual _viewscreen_, close enough to be seen with the naked eye. Even at this distance it was merely a moving spec against a background of specs, and an instant later that moving spec began to take on a menacing red glow. Spock shouted, "Incoming fire!" just seconds before that red glow exploded into a pair of blinding orange fireballs.

The twin Klingon phaser beams seemed ridiculously huge, like something fired out of a gigantic blowtorch. Both collided with Enterprise's deflector screens, bending into bizarre curving trajectories that passed the ship on both sides. Then another salvo, and then a third; lone phaser beam whipped around the bridge like a curveball pitch and slapped against the saucer section on the port side edge, scattering across the forcefields in a brilliant aurora.

_What _is_ it that makes phaser beams visible in space? _Kirk wondered for a fraction of a second before he felt the dull impact of another phaser strike and the warble of collision alarms that sounded automatically whenever the sensors detected an unsafe deceleration. Still more phaser beams whipped around the ship, whipping erratically around it like birds avoiding an obstacle.

"Shields are holding," Sulu announced, "But deflectors are overheating fast..."

"Full impulse, port forty degrees, down ten!" Kirk could barely hear himself over the cacophony of alarms and the complaints of the engines reverberating through the ship, but somehow he knew his words were reaching their destination. In another moment, the stars peeled off to one side of the viewscreen as Enterprise turned and accelerated, turning its weakened engine out of the Klingon's line of fire. He waited for Sulu to right the ship before order, "Lock phasers and return fire!"

Sulu hit the triggers on his console and five of the ship's forward phaser banks tracked on the distant warbird and fired at once. At this range, Starfleet phaser weapons had almost surgical accuracy, but a Klingon warbird was designed with a deceptively narrow cross section that made it difficult to hit, especially with its deflectors active. Even so, the ship's main phaser banks managed to make contact on the warbird's underbelly, just inboard of outs starboard nacelle. A tremendous cloud of hot gas erupted from the impact point and enveloped the warbird as a fifty-meter section of its armor plating vaporized around it.

"Registering several direct hits, Captain. Damage to Klingon outer hull, however..." Spock hesitated, "Now reading increased output from their warp engines..." And watching on the tactical plot, Kirk saw the warbird roll ninety degrees to starboard - turning still further away from its opponent - before it vanished into a rainbow-colored flash receding over the horizon as its warp drives flung it back into the void from whence it had emerged.

"Klingon vessel has entered warp," Spock said, "I am attempting to reacquire..."

_"Warning! Outer hull damage, Section Three Thirteen,"_ The computer began to announce in the background, then repeated two more times until someone in damage control responded to the ship's satisfaction.

Kirk stabbed the intercom and thundered, "Engineering, status report!"

_"Starboard nacelle is at the yellow line, but coming down steadily. I'm raising output on the port engine to compensate."_

"Rig for emergency warp. We're not out of the woods yet."

_"Aye, Sir."_

"Sulu, Chekov. As soon as he's located, give me continual tracking on the Klingon ship with torpedoes ready. If he comes at us again, I want him to drop out of warp in the middle of a kill zone."

"Aye, Sir..."

"Aye, Keptin.."

"I have a fix on the Klingon vessel," Spock reported at last, "It has again dropped out of warp, now in trans-lunar orbit on the far side of Doppelgänger, one point two million kilometers distance."

"Are they setting up another attack run?" Kirk asked.

"Their weapon systems remain active, however they are not maneuvering to intercept us..." Spock stared at his scope for a moment, then looked up slowly, "The Klingon ship has begun launching sensor drones on a wide dispersal pattern. Their drones are proceeding to equidistant positions in orbit of Doppelgänger."

"But they're not coming after _us_?"

Spock shook his head, "No further action from the Klingon vessel."

Kirk didn't completely buy it. But whatever they were up to, at least it would give them time to cool down their deflectors and brace for another attack, if another one was immanent. "Sulu, get those torpedoes ready, just in case."

"Aye, Sir."

Back on the intercom, Kirk ordered, "Mister Scott, on my signal, I want you to transfer all warp power into the main phaser bank. Put everything we've got into one concentrated burst."

_"Captain, that much power in one shot, we run the risk of burning out the control circuits. We won't get another shot..."_

"I'm aware of that, Mister Scott. We're only gonna _need_ one."

_"Aye... Uh... We'll get on it, Sir. You'll have it in two minutes."_

"Inform me when you're set and standby for my order..."

For the next forty five seconds, the universe seemed to stand still. Captain Kirk waited patiently, listening to the far off hum of shield generators reasserting themselves near the impulse deck as the fusion reactors struggled to replenish their energy reserves. He listened to the audible reports on the intercom as the engineering crews started setting up the power transfers to the forward main phaser battery, shored up potential failure points in the power grid in case of an overload. In considerably less than two minutes, the forward battery was ready to receive a full power surge, the starboard nacelle returned to normal operating temperature, and the deflector screens returned to full capacity. When the Klingons came at them again, this time Kirk would be armed and ready with his finger on the button, ready for them.

But then he stopped and thought about it: surely the Klingons _knew_ that. They wouldn't break off an attack for this long just to give their opponents time to recover. And after still another uneventful minute, Kirk asked, "Still nothing, Spock?"

"No further action, Captain. I think we've been fortunate."

"_Were_ we, though?" Kirk left his command chair for the first time in nearly five minutes and walked directly over to his science officer's console, looking to confirm that report for himself. Sure enough, the Klingon warbird was still there, coasting gently along its high orbit as a constellation of sensor drones maneuvered for thousands of kilometers around it. "They warp into orbit, fire on us, and then _run away_... what is that, Klingon for hello?"

Spock folded his arms and leaned back in his chair, feeling perhaps a sense of intellectual helplessness. "There are some logical possibilities, Captain, all of them quite complicated."

"Doesn't seem _that_ complicated," Kirk was thinking out loud now, "Why would they fire on us and then break off? Not to pick a fight, they had us dead to rights in the first attack."'

"Our phasers did cause some damage to their outer hull, Captain. We may have affected their sensors or some other critical system."

"But they aren't coming after us again. Why not?"

Spock thought about this for a long moment, "A warning, perhaps?"

"They would have opened a channel for that..." speaking of which, "Uhura, hail that Klingon ship and request visual communications."

"Aye, Sir..."

"Maybe to lure us away from the Cardassians?" Kirk said, "Or maybe just to discourage us from interfering with them?"

"Possible, but it does not explain the deployment of sensor probes."

"True..." Kirk raised a brow, "So they came here looking for something. As soon as they got here they opened fire on _us_..."

Spock pondered this for a moment, as some more security-minded aspect of his mind had been doing for some time now. The only remaining possibility was perhaps the most menacing, "Mistaken identity?"

"Channel open to Klingon vessel," Uhura said.

Which meant it was up to Kirk to initiate Enterprise's half of the conversation. He strode back to his command chair and punched the "ship-to-ship" button on his arm control, knowing that as soon as he did his face would be appearing on the Klingon bridge. "This is Federation Starship Enterprise to Klingon warbird. Please respond."

In turn, the face of the Klingon commander appeared on the main viewer, glaring at him with a pair of piercing blue eyes that shone like phaser cannons about to fire. It was a face that was meant to scowl, made all the more intimidating by platinum plates worn in his hair and the bridge of his nose and a bone structure suggestive of a creature that would be extremely comfortable with multiple head-on collisions. From the viewscreen's perspective, the Klingon commander seemed to be sitting in a throne, staring down from a high place; Kirk had heard this was partly to intimidate enemies of the empire, but mostly it was an accident of the design of the Klingon bridge, whose communications screen was slightly below the main viewer.

The Klingon commander stunned almost everyone on the bridge by speaking first in untranslated English, "I am Kempa Ha'lok, General Officer of the Klingon warbird Kor'ah."

"I'm Captain James T. Kirk. Very curious why you opened fire on me a moment ago and then-"

"James Kirk..." Ha'lok's eyebrow rose a quarter of an inch, "You wouldn't be related to _Winona_ Kirk, would you?"

All eyes turned to the Captain's chair, expressions varying from incredulity to awe. Kirk answered the only way he could, "She was my mother... why do you know her?"

"GhaH quvvam ghol..." Ha'lok began, this time speaking in Klingon; the universal translator printed out a best-fit approximation of his words on the screen just below his image. "We met in battle years ago," said Ha'lok's translation, "She killed a lot of my soldiers. Killed a lot of my enemies too. She even managed to kill _me_ once... well, a _clone_ of me...long story. As for you, I have heard some amusing stories about your adventures in the Ketha Province and the Massacre at Khitomer... Apparently you are your _father's_ son."

Kirk cleared his throat as a preamble for his first non-personal (and non-awkward) question, "Explain your actions a moment ago. Help me to understand... you don't seem to be here for a fight..."

"Quite right, James T. Kirk. We saw your deflectors going up and we assumed you must have been our target. So I may have rushed the cannons, just a bit. Your counter-attack was impressive, by the way."

_He's impressed_, Kirk thought, _And he's not apologizing_. It reminded him that Klingons loved a good fight, even if it wasn't with an actual enemy.

On the other hand, this raised another question for Kirk, "Who exactly did you _think_ we were?"

"The Nacirema," Ha'lok said, "A Romulan preybird we have been hunting for some time. My intelligence specialist traced its most recent transmissions to this system four months ago and we are here to investigate its activities and then destroy it."

Four months ago. Meaning the Romulans had actually arrived in this system before Enterprise _or_ the Gorn and had simply remained out of sight, probably hidden behind their cloaking device. And Kirk suddenly thought about the phantom image Miri had fired at on the planet surface. Rumors about the improved Romulan cloaking device had been circulating for years, but whether or not it was possible to cloak something as small as a _person_... "Why would the Romulans come _here_?"

"Until moments ago, we had assumed they were planning to attack a Federation outpost and then blame it on the Klingon Empire. I can see, however..." Ha'lok looked off to one side, apparently at one of his sensor monitor screens where something fairly unsettling was being displayed, "... there is much more to this situation than we expected. Do my eyes deceive me, James T. Kirk, or is this planet physically identical to the Terran home world?"

Kirk thought carefully about what to say next. Very little was understood about Klingon culture and its subdivisions, but the dominant social groupings had parallels to Earth history that were not at all encouraging. The Klingon Empire and the Federation of Planets had spent the last several years teetering on the brink of war, and disclosing too much at a time like this could create more problems than it answered questions. Besides, the last thing this political/scientific free for all needed was another highly formidable contender. "We've seen no sign of a Romulan vessel," Kirk said, "And as for the situation... well, there's more to it than even _we_ expected. We're not totally sure what's going on here ourselves." Which, actually, was far from a lie. Strictly speaking, even Spock and Marcus didn't fully understand how Doppelgänger came to exist, theories and clues aside.

Halok turned to the ride and stared at something, probably a sensor screen built into the side of the bridge within viewing angle of his chair, then back at the downward-mounted communications monitor, "We are detecting two other vessels in the area, both of unknown design. We have also detected two Tholian spacecraft in very low orbit of the second moon, which have gone to some elaborate lengths to disguise their presence. I take it they are here for the same reason you are here."

"Probably, so are the Romulans. There's a great deal of interstellar interest in the technology that may have created this planet."

Ha'lok nodded. "There is _always_ interest when the First Federation is involved."

Spock almost jumped out of his uniform as quickly as he leapt to his science console. Kirk meanwhile felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up. "Are you familiar with this phenomenon or its creators?"

"Not personally, no. But according to Imperial records, the First Federation is an ancient and very _advanced_ cooperative of beings. They've been known to use a transformative matrix called the Chameloid, a biological construct with a penchant for..." Halok's face turned upwards into a new expression that was halfway between a scowl and a grin, "...plagiarism."

"No record of such a race, Captain," Spock said, exhausting the databanks of Enterprise's library computer, "however, Klingon space exploration pre-dates even the earliest Vulcan archives by several centuries."

"This little race of ours is getting crowded." Kirk turned back to the viewscreen, "Captain Ha'lok, would you be willing to share some of your data regarding the First Federation and their technology?"

"No."

The abruptness of the response was startling in itself. "Not even to honor the memory of your once worthy-adversary?"

"Honor?" Ha'lok's expression briefly turned quizzical, "Do I look simple to you?"

"Well, I did _single-handedly_ take down the Narada..."

"And if you had done so on a _Klingon_ ship, I might have cared."

"Fair enough... Okay, so, how about a trade?"

"No."

"Um..." again that startling abrupt rejection. Somehow, Kirk felt like he'd just been turned down for a prom date. "Ha'lok, we have some information about this planet, and what the First Federation have been doing here for the past few decades. We'd be willing to exchange that information for anything you can tell us about their home territory."

"A mutual exchange of information," Ha'lok said, suddenly thoughtful, "Beneficent to both sides, allowing a more complete picture to emerge that will eventually lead us to the truth."

"Exactly. So, what do you say?"

"No."

Kirk sighed, "Listen, Ha'lok..."

"You would be a fool to make such an offer and I would be a fool to accept it. We Klingons have traveled these stars since your people were living in grass huts, James T. Kirk. We've seen this before."

"I don't think you understand what I'm offering..."

"I don't think _you_ understand what you're offering. Look at the world below us, Kirk. You have surely learned by now that it was not created from nothing. There was life there once, perhaps a whole civilization. That life has been perverted from its original state and it can never be restored to what it was. Most of the inhabitants probably died in the transformation... those were the _lucky_ ones. The survivors have been kept alive in one twisted form after another, decade after decade, raw materials for the First Federation's sick experiments. The Chameloid is an _abomination,_ used by a race of psychopaths who torture other life forms just for their own amusement... Why in Khaless' name would I want information about _that_?"

Kirk felt a stone forming in the pit of his stomach. He tried to sound brave as he formed an answer, "We may not agree with their methods, Ha'lok, but you can't deny that the techniques required to do something like this are very impr-"

Halok's response was so sharp it seemed to decapitate Kirk's sentence. "Chab rur SoH?" It took several seconds longer than usual for the translation to appear on screen. When it did, it raised eyebrows all across the bridge: _Do you like pie?_

Kirk flinched, "What?"

Ha'lok repeated the question, this time in careful English, "_Do. You. Like. Pie._"

"I..." Kirk shrugged, "I suppose so. Why do you ask?"

Halok tilted his head slightly, "When the First Federation grinds your entire crew into delicious meat pies, I'll make sure to ask them for the _recipe_." Ha'lok left those words to resonate in their ears as he closed the channel.


	21. Chapter 21

**KNOW YOUR ENEMY**

_[ Private Communique ]_

_To: NCC-1701, USS Enterprise - Attn: Captain James T. Kirk, Commanding Officer_

_From: Gallaron System, Planet B (Gloria)- Vice Admiral Winona Kirk, SolFleet (ret)_

_Hi Jim. I know you've been a busy man with your five-year-mission and all, but it's good to finally hear from my squirmy little boy after all these months. I've been following you on the news, we're all very proud of you here on Gloria. You know I hate to do this, but I have to point out the irony: you've been elevated to the rank of All-Time Bigshot by kicking Romulan ass... that's exactly how your father got his oh-so-brief command, and it's exactly how great grandfather wound up on the Montezuma the year I was born. Hell, if it wasn't for the Romulans we'd all be plowing fields in Iowa right now. Call it a family curse... or a blessing... or whatever._

_Your message, of course, was a request for information on a Klingon warrior named Ha'lok. I know him very well, but I have to admit I don't actually know much _about_ him. I know that he's an Augment, a career mercenary, and in his younger days used to have a puppydog crush on a certain Starfleet tactical officer he met on Rigel VII (long story). I also know he comes from a peasant family that could never afford their own ships, which explains why he would be working for an outfit like the Imperial Klingon Army. The IKA is basically a mercenary corps on the payroll of the high council, the hired guns who do the dirty work the nobles can't be bothered with. Like most commoners - and Augments in particular - Ha'lok is thoughtful, methodical, patient, sometimes even charming. More importantly, though, he is a ruthless cold-blooded and highly efficient killer, exactly the kind of person you do not want as an enemy._

_It's possible that the years have tempered him a bit, but I wouldn't count on it. He doesn't like complications, so he'll probably ignore you unless you get in his way. Also, don't bother name-dropping, thinking maybe he owes me one. Ha'lok isn't stupid enough to fall for that, and I don't like you nearly enough to vouch for you._

_Good luck out there._

_- Mom_

_- Stardate 2261.3.6_

- 1140 hours -

It was about the response that Captain Kirk expected from his invincible mother, more than a day after sending the message by way of the civilian comms relay at Epsilon Hydrae. He wasn't sure if she was joking about the last part - he had _never_ been able to tell when she was joking - but he took her broader meaning to heart all the same.

The time delay had given him enough time to look up the historical record as to how and where she would have met someone like Ha'lok in the first place, and so he'd spent the last two days looking up not only the service history of then-Lieutenant Commander Winona Kirk, but also the battle record of the three starships she served on before joining the colonial fleet at Epsilon Hydrae. That Ha'lok had personal dealings with George Kirk pretty much narrowed it down, and search of the logs of the USS Kelvin found Ha'lok's name cross-referenced with the heading "The Xyrillian Genocide."

This, Kirk reflected, was already a bad sign. But once Kirk got into the Kelvin's log entries, that's when things got _weird_. Between what turned out to be gaping holes in the log - the reports mentioned data corruption due to an unexplained main computer failure - Kirk saw mention of the USS Kelvin coming to the aid of a Xyrillian refugee ship that was apparently seeking sanctuary in Federation space. Ha'lok had arrived with squadron of gunships, the two sides exchanged fire... Then somehow, two days later, reports of mysterious injuries among the crew involving sudden organ failure, followed by some kind of massive system failure in the main computer... And then four days later, a log entry by Lieutenant George Kirk that mentioned Commander Ha'lok having safely _departed_ from the Kelvin and returned to his own vessel, bound for home. The Xyrillians were never mentioned again, and Federation historians record that the Klingon Empire hunted their entire species to extinction just a few months later. Kirk concluded that either Ha'lok had murdered all the refugees, or Kelvin had arranged for their (temporary) escape. In any case, the situation was probably a lot more complicated than the logs let on, but it told Kirk one important thing about his Klingon adversary: he was old, and he was _hard_, even for a Klingon.

"Jim?" McCoy asked from behind the Captain's chair, once he was sure Kirk had finished reading the printout of his mother's message, "You called me up here?"

"Yeah. Onise."

McCoy read between the lines. "He was exposed to a phaser stun on the planet surface. Some kind of friendly fire incident, I guess. Didn't help that his overshield wasn't active at the time... Anyway, the phase pulse must have activated the nanomachines somehow. They've started transforming him into one of the caveman males that hang out with the reavers all the time."

Kirk winced. It seemed like a comedy of errors from a group of irresponsible rookies, combined with an _epic_ case of unexpected consequences, "How did he get infected with the nanomachines?"

"We were _all_ infected, probably. But none of them were activated before we beamed aboard the ship, and without a power source they shut down and decomposed on their own."

"Hm..." Kirk looked at the tablet in his hand again, re-read the message a second time.

"Good news?" McCoy skimmed the message over his shoulder.

"Bad news," Kirk handed him the tablet, scowling, "My sources on Gloria _strongly_ advise against antagonizing this Ha'lok character."

"Sound advice from our Colonial informant," Spock added from the science council, "In light of our opponent's tactical capabilities."

Kirk nodded to that, turning his chair to face him, "Have you finished your analysis?"

"I _have_," Spock turned to one of the transparent heads up displays near the science console and called up the relevant data for Kirk to see. A diagram of the D7 class - based on the ship's silhouette in their sensor readings - appeared on the screen, "We have identified at least six torpedo launchers with as many as twenty four torpedoes per launcher. The torpedoes themselves are derived from the Narada's missile technology, similar to the types the Klingons fired at us at the Khitomer Incident. There is also a conspicuous increase in armor plating on the primary hull, plus the presence of what appears to be a transporter-based mechanism for rapid replenishment of the ablative armor. I have also determined that those two outboard structures on the secondary hull, which intelligence identifies as 'warp engine nacelles' are, _in fact_, a pair of extremely high-output phaser emitters powered by self-contained dilithium conversion units."

Kirk took a long slow breath and rested his hands on his knees. Doctor McCoy's jaw literally dropped, along with his arms limply by his sides, "Those are _phasers_?! They have _ships_ smaller than that!"

"They probably double as deflector units too," Kirk said, thinking out loud, "So their warp drive units can be a lot smaller. Probably heavily armored, close to the reactor block..." then he winced as he realized, "Damn, _no wonder_ they broke off! Our phaser strike must have damaged their weapon pod!"

Spock nodded, having reached the same conclusion on his own, "I would estimate that Kor'ah's offensive weapons can produce not less than three times the output of our main phaser banks."

"And our deflectors wouldn't last long if he fired at maximum," Kirk added, "As it stands, he thought he was shooting at a bird of prey so he didn't _bother_ with a maximum charge."

McCoy sighed, "We lucked out."

"So it would seem," Spock nodded, "Something else, Jim. I have been analyzing data on the life form readings from the Klingon ship. There seems to be a staggering number of distinct life units on board, and most are operating on a highly reduced level of functioning. Roughly two hundred are active at any given time, the rest are being kept in a state very close to death."

"Sleepers," Kirk realized, remembering where he had seen that condition before, "Most of the crew is cryogenically frozen."

Spock nodded grimly, "If their hibernation units are half as efficient as those of 20th century Earth, Ha'lok could have as many as two thousand warriors in stasis."

"And if they engage us, they take down our shields, next thing you know we're up to our elbows in Klingons."

"It would be worth keeping in mind," Spock went on, "The Klingon High Council is dominated by a handful of aristocratic families who wield sufficient economic resources to ensure the loyalty of commanders and troops through the promise of monetary rewards. Assault troops are known to keep a tally of battlefield kills as well as trophies of their victims to validate their accomplishments."

"Okay, this leaves us with two major problems," Kirk said, again thinking out loud, "Firstly, we have a Klingon asshole with some enormous guns on a search and destroy mission who doesn't really like us."

"Fortunately," Spock added, "he is at worst _indifferent_ to us and unlikely to attack unless his mission requires it."

"That's the one thing we have going for us right now... but the other problem is, somewhere in this system, maybe even in orbit with us, is a cloaked Romulan bird of prey. I would guess they've been monitoring us in orbit and even on the surface ever since we got here."

Spock nodded sagely, "Intelligence dispatches contain no indications of a man-portable cloaking device."

"That only means we haven't seen them using it yet..." Kirk thought silently for another few moments, "Spock, do you suppose the portable version operates on the same principle as the larger one?"

Spock pondered the question for just a moment, "Possibly. Starfleet overshields are similar enough to our ship-borne counterparts."

"Down on the planet, you had a partial reading on whatever it was Miri fired at. Assuming she was firing at a cloaked Romulan observer..."

Spock nodded, following the thought to its conclusion, and threw all of his concentration into the library computer console, "We should be able to extrapolate their parameters from the telemetry feed from the tricorder. I should say, a more detailed analysis is in order."

"Agreed. In the mean time let's go to yellow alert, just in case that analysis turns up more bad news."

- 1143 hours -

Miri was just about getting used to the insanity of the turbolift system. It took her a few days to wrap her brain around the idea of an elevator that moved at nearly the speed of sound - and without any feeling of movement at all - but like most things on the Enterprise she simply accepted them as the usual technological magic of the New Earth. Then she spent a few days shuffling logistics reports for the maintenance division and kept seeing references to something called "inertial stabilizers" and gathered from her midshipman handbook that the aforementioned device was _the_ magical technology she had been confused about, the one thing that made all the difference to a perfectly functional machine.

There were a _lot_ of those little gizmos in the logistics reports, and as a midshipman-in-training she was increasingly required to actually know the names and functions of these gizmos to be able to answer basic questions and queries, such as the question Ensign Ayala was now asking her for the third time in as many hours, "What's the word on that transtator array?"

Miri answered without even looking at her palmcomp, "The CRM114 you ordered... still in queue, but Lieutenant Hobus should have it up before the end of the shift."

Ayala stared despairingly at her otherwise useless communications monitor console in an otherwise bustling room full of identical consoles and extremely busy communications officers. "What's the holdup?"

"The planetology team placed an order for some specialized equipment that Hobus didn't have in inventory. It's taken a while to get it done."

"What kind of equipment?" Ayala asked.

Miri shrugged, "I don't know, that's just what Hobus said."

"Typical... go back to Hobus and tell him that ship-board orders take priority. And tell him to remember that the Enterprise is a _starship_, not a retail buy-n-fly."

"Should I use those exact words?"

"Those exact words. You know, this is the fourth time I've had to play second banana to that da-"

_"Yellow Alert, Yellow Alert. All sections to standby battlestations."_ A single-tone horn blasted from the intercom panel over Miri's head, and a sudden change of lighting transformed the ship's atmosphere from one of a peaceful exploration to a self-contained battleship in a transitory state between dormant and deadly. It was the third time in three days an alert had been called, and like everyone else in the room Miri couldn't help but wonder who _else_ in the universe had arrived to try and pick a fight with the Enterprise. More and more these days, Doppelgänger was becoming the scene of an intergalactic starship tournament.

Miri knew, from a lifetime of memories that weren't technically hers, that the number one cause of death for all astronauts was panic. So she quieted her first nervous impulses and asked, calmly, "What do I do now?" knowing as she did that the second greatest cause of death for astronauts was failing to ask questions when they needed to know something important.

Ayala answered tersely, "You're a midshipman in training. That means you do whatever your superior officer tells you."

"And that would be you?"

"That would be me. Now go down to the machining section, wring Hobus' neck and get me those goddamn transtators!"

- 1207 hours -

"I have something, Captain," Spock plotted its position on the overhead screen above the science station even as the more detailed data streamed through his scope, "radiative anomaly in the ultraviolet range, bearing one oh two mark forty one. Co-orbital position at approximately five hundred kilometers."

Kirk raised a brow, "That close? Are you sure you're reading it right?"

"UV anomaly has the same interference pattern we observed on the planet. Intensity is negligible, sensors barely read it at all."

Kirk felt a red alert blaring on the back of his neck. If the Klingons hadn't spotted the Romulans yet, there was no telling how long that cloaked ship - if that's what it really was - had been shadowing the Enterprise. It could have been there for hours, days, or even weeks by now. Or it could have just arrived in the last few minutes... but in either case, there were very few reasons to move so close to the Enterprise while under cloak. Except to attack, or possibly... "Spock, reconfigure internal sensors to scan for UV anomalies."

Spock raised a brow, "Inside the Enterprise? That may take several minutes."

"I know. Put a rush on it." Kirk moved away from the science console and stabbed the intercom on his command chair, "Lieutenant Rand, listen carefully. We may have intruders aboard the ship. I want security teams mobilized and heavily armed in staging areas. Keep this quiet, I don't want the intruders to know we're onto them."

"Scanning of engineering section shows negative reaction, Captain," Spock said, scrolling through reports from individual sensors-tens of thousands in all-probing the large spacious frames of the secondary hull. This would take far longer than a search of the saucer module, both because of the more cluttered environment packed with machinery, and because of the need to be more thorough in high-security areas. "Frames one through five are clear. Now scanning frames six through ten."

Kirk was most worried about frames seven and eight, where the warp core complex was situated with its sensitive equipment and power conversion systems. If the Romulans had come with an intention of sabotage, there were a thousand ways they could destroy the Enterprise without firing a shot.

"Frames six through ten are clear," Spock reported, and even he sounded relieved.

Kirk stabbed the intercom again, "Rand, use emergency overrides to block all passage between primary and secondary hulls. Seal all hatches and emergency bulkheads."

_"Aye, Sir."_

"Are you so sure there _is_ an intruder, Captain?" Spock asked as the sensors began to sweep the saucer module with their new settings.

"Call it a hunch," Kirk said, "Besides, if I had an advantage like that, one my sworn enemies didn't know about, that's exactly the move I would make."

Spock nodded in agreement, and yet for the moment the sensors showed the saucer module, also, totally clear of anomalies. "Nothing on scanners, Captain."

Kirk breathed a sigh of relief, "Sulu, raise deflectors to a minimal defensive level, just in case they _do_ try to board us."

Spock looked up from his console with a worried expression, the gears of logic furiously grinding away in his highly-ordered mind. "I would like to begin a second scan, Captain."

Kirk looked at him curiously, "Something you missed?"

"My earlier scan was based on the assumption that UV radiation was not completely deflected by the Romulan cloaking device. However, this seems an illogical proposition, considering such devices are obviously designed to be used in direct sunlight, deep within solar systems and strategically vital worlds. Therefore, the UV anomaly may be an artifact of electromagnetic phase-shift, possibly capturing the user's own thermal emissions and pumping them to a higher frequency, skipping the visual range into the high UV band..."

"Then you're adjusting sensors to compensate for this?"

"No, Sir." Spock turned away from his console for a moment, "Mister DeCasta, go to manual on environmental controls, increase internal temperature to thirty five celsius and increase humidity levels by forty percent."

Ensign DeCasta, the ship's life support technician, nodded, "Tropical rainforest, Aye Sir."

Kirk nodded in understanding, "Turn up the heat and they're easier to see."

"Exactly, Captain."

"Let's just hope to hell that scan turns back just as negative in the hotbox or we're going to have a very sweaty firefight on our hands."


	22. Chapter 22

**MIRAGE**

Doppelgänger-B Orbit

USS Enterprise (NCC-1701)

Stardate 2261.3.6

- 1210 hours -

Rules... regulations... the shallow pretenses that small people placed in front of themselves to pretend they still had control of their lives in a universe of uncertainty. Carol Marcus knew _that_ kind of control was an illusion, that most people - even the most powerful - were often slaves to the whims of others, and however else the universe changed, this one constant never would. Nowhere was this more clear than on Doppelgänger, where an entire world had been fashioned from the dormant seed of another simply because someone in the universe had a craving for whale meat. Seven billion lives had been created and then horribly destroyed just for this purpose. How many more could be spared from suffering by more compassionate use of this same process?

Or so she told herself, plugging another round of new settings into the signal processor in the corner of the room. She'd been trapped in her quarters like a prisoner for a day and a half with only a palmcomp and fifty tracks of Phaserbrane to keep her company (only a handful of Phaserbrane songs actually had lyrics; Carol stuck to the heavy space-angst riffs when she was in a bad mood). But with a quarter million credits worth of lab equipment packed into what had otherwise been her living room, she hardly noticed the passage of time. Lieutenant Rand had cut off her terminal from the Enterprise's computer network, but the ASDEC unit she brought with her from the lab at Hesperia Planum - in itself, a kind of scientific swiss army knife with more functions than she could count - was more than enough for the job now. She still had the data from that Z-Band pulse, that unique pattern that had triggered such an astonishing change in Miri's genome, and in such a specific and controlled way. After days of study, Carol was convinced the transformation was intentional, maybe a form of communication, or an attempt by the planet's nanorobot swarm to prevent her from being captured by what it now interpreted as a hostile force. The only way to know for sure was to test the pattern on infected tissue and see what happened.

And for the twentieth time today, she locked in the latest round of settings to the computer and pushed another slide into the microscope slot. ASDEC was a desk-sized machine with a half dozen shoebox-sized modules arranged in racks; the module she was using now was designed to bombard tissue samples with any form of radiation from radio waves to theta rays and could even handle a few subspace frequencies if you fed it enough power. It had the right range for that recorded SZ-pattern, and relative to the size of the tissue samples she'd so expertly pilfered from the bio lab, it should have been more than powerful enough. But now, for the twentieth time today, she started up the antenna for a full three repetitions of the pulse and watched in biting disappointment as the translucent cells on the slide - in this case, liver-cell cultures from one of the Onlies - briefly turned black as coal, churned for a moment, then immediately returned to their original form as if nothing had happened to them.

"Son of a bitch..." it was the same as the other nineteen test runs. Interesting as it was, ASDEC's limited archives couldn't furnish an answer as to why this was happening, or even what was happening to the cells. She half doubted even Enterprise' computers were smart enough to figure that out, but with better equipment at least she'd have a fighting chance.

And to think that the Starfleet crews weren't even _bothering_ to experiment with the SZ-pattern!

The sound of the door chime snapped her out of her introspection, automatically muting a chinese-language Phaserbrane song. It was one of those few sounds she'd programmed herself to respond to no matter what she was doing, sleep or awake, just in case it represented a business call and some time-sensitive matter from one of her colleagues. No such luck, now, as she plodded over to the door panel and saw Doctor Ayash's face in the small video screen next to the door. Probably not a social call, since he had his medical kit with him, so she decided against pretending to be asleep and pressed the release to open the door.

"How you are doing, Doctor Marcus?" Ayash asked in his watered down Arabic accent.

"Could be better. Just... well..." she gestured at the ASDEC set crammed into the corner of her not-exactly-spacious living room, "I'm working on that Z pattern we recorded on the surface. Unfortunately my equipment is about a hundred years old, I can't get any decent results."

Ayash nodded as he pulled a medical tricorder from his kit and tinkered with the scanner settings. "I have hearing something like that. That is Z pattern that making Miri transform?"

"Yeah. I'm convinced it's some type of alien control signal, maybe a set of command instructions to the nanomachines in Miri's body. I was thinking that if we could get a response from those machines we might be able to isolate them and study them in greater detail."

"That is not bad idea... though I am thinking it is too late for doing this."

Marcus stared at him for a moment, fearing the worst. "What's been happening out there, anyway? The guard said something about an attack."

"It is not major thing. We having exchange of fire with Klingon warship. No damage, more like sparring really. The problem is rumor I am hearing, that Captain Kirk was told by Klingon commander that this technology being used in sick experiments by group called First Federation. He is thinking now we should abandoning this investigation."

Marcus was mortified, but not completely surprised. It fit too well into Kirk's growing reputation as a knee-jerk reactionary who was probably just now discovering that he was in way over his head. "That would be a shame for Starfleet. But sooner or later, someone's going to have to keep up the chase. It might take a few years longer, but I'm not willing to give up."

"I am not thinking Kirk would abandon the effort on a whim. He may having something right to be worried about." Ayash switched the scanner head to trace mode and started a series of slow sweeps around Marcus' shoulders and neck. There was the faint whistle of spectrometers and chemical traps and the hiss of air being pulled through the scanner, and after a few moments Ayash switched the scanner to ultrasound mode and started another sweep of her chest and stomach.

"I don't _feel_ like I'm dying," Marcus said coyly, "Except this room feels awfully stuffy..." and now that she thought about it, "Why is it so hot in here all of a sudden?"

"I do not know, it just happening in last few minutes. Environmental malfunction, maybe?"

"Oh, so it's not just me... in that case, what are you doing here anyway?"

"Doctor McCoy's orders," Ayash said, almost apologetically, "Medical screening for everyone having beamed down to Doppelgänger."

"Screening for what? Something going on?"

Ayash sighed, "One of away team members having developed reaver malignancy. No one else seems being affected, this is just precaution."

"One of the away team...?" Marcus raised a brow, "Are you checking for chemical traces of cancer tissues or the ionic compounds of the alien nanomachines?"

"Lieutenant Onise testing positive for both, so I scanning thoroughly for both."

Marcus' eyes lit up like a pair of miniature suns. "One thing I've been thinking about here... well, the tissue samples I have here are mostly from Miri's second examination after she beamed back from the planet. And also from reaver tissue we collected earlier. I'm not getting any results from these, but I just realized... well, if the Reavers are disconnected from the constructor matrix, and if Miri's constructors have already encountered this program, we might need a fresh sample."

Ayash raised a brow.

"Lieutenant Onise hasn't been back to Doppelgänger since the away mission, right?"

"I see..." Ayash smiled, "You are thinking of duplicating Miri's transformation using Lieutenant Onise's samples."

Marcus nodded, "It could be that the transformation is just a side effect of whatever the Z-band signal _really_ does. It probably only has that affect the first time it's sent. Kinda like fabricator licenses, right? Once you authenticate a license you can make as many copies as you want."

"Ah," Ayash smiled, "Z-band signal may being software key for constructors?"

"Could be. Or it could just be an odd coincidence. Still, if nothing else, it'll exhaust the Z-band angle and get us to look in a new direction."

"What if _not_ working properly?"

"Probably, nothing will happen. But if you _do_ get a reaction, we'll be able to observe the effect in a laboratory setting. We'll be able to isolate exactly how the machines work and maybe catch a few of them in the act."

Ayash smiled even brighter, "That is not bad idea... maybe we finishing this examination in sickbay, Doctor?"

Marcus almost jumped out of her skin, "You can do that? I thought I was under house arrest."

"Medical priority. You being more familiar with this than I am. But we must being quick or Captain Dunsel may object."

She didn't need to be told twice, and the idea of leaving the ship's commanding greenhorn out of the loop was somehow highly appealing. Call it karma, or divine justice, or whatever. In any case, Marcus scooped her palmcomp off the ASDEC table and darted for the door after him... but not before pausing just long enough to extract the memory tape with the hand-written label "Genesis" on the case and set it on the ASDEC table for safekeeping. It was never a good idea to keep both copies of your data in the same place, after all.

- 1209 hours -

As far as Miri could tell, being pigeonholed as a "runner" for the communications department had almost the same dynamics of her previous life in the slums. Run from one place to another, gathering supplies and delivering them to the people who need them most. The only difference was the supplies were easy to find, just incredibly hard to get, and required a set of social skills she had never had occasion to learn, even less so on a starship almost totally alien to her despite its Earthly origins.

She was, for example, completely unequipped to deal with Lieutenant Hobus' blithe dismissals when she arrived at the machine shop for the fourth time that day. Ayala had rejected his first excuse (blaming the planetology team) and patiently accepted the second ("We're closed down for the shift change"). The third simply didn't fly, and neither would the fourth, but Miri lacked the vocabulary or the social graces to make this clear to Hobus in a way that would grab his attention. "I know we're at alert stations, Sir, but Ensign Ayala _really_ wants that transtator," she repeated, "She's been waiting patiently for a while."

Hobus was listening, but much of his attention was on some kind of delicate task at the large work bench in the corner of the machine shop. There were dozens of these benches around, all oriented around a central terminal that had a kind of miniature turbolift door and a conveyor that, from time to time, spat out stacks of unfinished machine parts and electronics equipment. Miri had come to understand that somewhere below the machine shop was a "fabricator," a device that used some technical magic she didn't understand but otherwise was capable of making just about anything. For some reason it couldn't make anything _complicated_, only parts and components, which - once manufactured - had to be assembled piecemeal by skilled machinists right here in the shop. She couldn't tell what Hobus was putting together, but whatever it was it was the size of a briefcase and required some precision work with laser-soldering iron and a magnifier in his eye. "She's been waiting," Hobus said, "But not patiently."

"She's getting impatient..."

"She's _always_ impatient. Seems to be an Orion trait."

Miri sighed, "If I go back up there without that transtator, she's gonna send me right back down again."

Hobus grinned without looking up, "And this concerns me why?"

"I'm getting tired."

"So?"

Miri sighed again, gritting her teeth and checking a temper she didn't realize had been fraying, "Look... I know I'm just a trainee, I know I'm nothing compared to you veterans... but see, I'm just trying to make the best of this situation, and you're not helping matters much by being difficult."

Hobus chuckled, "Look, don't start crying on me or anything. It's just some spare parts. The fabricators are already working overtime on that specialist equipment and we don't have time to assemble a transtator array right now. So unless you want to pick up a tool belt and do the work yourself, Ayala is gonna have to wait."

"That's not good enough..."

Hobus looked up at her for the first time, "You're dismissed, Ensign. Have a nice day."

"Yes, Sir." One of her very first lessons in the orientation briefing was that when a superior officer tells you to do something, you do it, period, no questions asked. In another lifetime she'd spent enough years flying F-22s in the Israeli Air Force to understand the consequences if she failed to live up to this implicit military convention...

"Wait a second, Ensign," Hobus waved her back over and then quickly finished whatever it was he was working on. Miri stepped up to the work bench as he said, "Take this to Doctor Ayash in the Isolation Lab. It's a priority job he just sent down." He closed up the outer shell of the case and handed it over to Miri.

"You have time to do rush jobs for Doctor Ayash?"

"It's just a stock part. Surgical tractor beam with a manual control input. The Isolation Lab only has automatics."

"Alright... er... Aye, Sir." She left the machining shop in a seething frustration and stepped into the turbolift at the end of the corridor. She spat her destination to the computer, and then two seconds later the door opened again to a completely different part of the Enterprise.

Miri had been to the Isolation Ward before, not long after her transcendental mutation that had granted her the knowledge and experience of an eighty five year old ace pilot and career astronaut. From that experience she understood that an Isolation Lab was usually used to quarantine highly contagious medical patients or samples of things that, if not properly handled, could contaminate the entire ship. It was not a place she preferred to go if she had a choice, but there were already rumors around the ship that one of the crew had started turning into a reaver, and her curiosity far outweighed her present anxiety.

Plus, for some inexplicable reason it was unbelievably hot on the ship today and the Isolation Lab - with its own independent life support system - was probably the coolest place on the ship right now.

Doctor Marcus was standing at a computer console to one side of the lab, partly reading a spreadsheet on the monitor but mostly watching a writhing mutated form under a stack of medical linens, something that might have once been human except for the popping veins the size of garden hoses and distended lumps of tissue sticking out of the sides of its head. Though heavily sedated, it was clear Lieutenant Onise was in a fantastic amount of pain, what Miri knew to be the late onset stages of the Caveman transformation. For some reason, she even felt responsible for what the man was going through now, as if his being exposed to her world was, somehow, _her_ fault.

Marcus recognized Miri's approach, then recognized the object she carried, then smiled with satisfaction. "That was fast. Thank you."

Miri handed over the case and Doctor Marcus, in turn, handed it off to Doctor Ayash, who began the apparently simple process of swapping its contents with a corresponding less suitable device. The thing inside the case looked something like a fluorescent light tube, about a foot long and an inch wide, mounted on the end of a black plastic rectangle with a small control panel and screen on the side of it. The one Ayash replaced was mounted on a swingarm attached to the ceiling; unlike the new one, the old device had no control panel or screen, and Ayash discarded it with due care in a corner of the room while he attached the new device to the arm. "So how you wanting to do this?" Ayash asked, "Program Z-pattern manually?"

"I have it on file here," Marcus said, waving a memory card for him, "Just plug it in and give it a blast. Keep it simple: two sweeps on blood samples, two on bone marrow, two on liver tissue, two on cancer tissue. If there's no reaction from any of those, we'll try a sweep on the Lieutenant and see if there's a reaction."

"You should kill him," Miri said, almost chidingly despite her station on this ship. She spoke now, not just with the experience of someone who had lived through the Reaver plague on her world, but as a woman who had lived through two regional wars and a global conflict and spent more time wrestling with unknowns in space than either of them had been alive. "Get it over with now before things get complicated."

Doctor Ayash rolled his eyes, "This is not old Palestine, Miriam. We not simply disposing of people because they are inconvenience."

"Neither do we. We fought and killed our enemies. Your enemy is anyone or anything that's trying to kill you. You get them before they get you, and you get to live a little longer."

"In twenty third century, we having more evolved sensibility. We holding all forms of life in high regard, respect for all things' right to exist."

Miri grinned, "Heard _that_ before... but as Jabez used to say, continued existence is a _desire_, not a right. The _desire_ to exist is something worth respecting. But this man is becoming a reaver..."

"The caveman types are sedentary," Marcus said offhand, "They don't really do anything except sit around and wait for the females to copulate with them. Then, of course, the females _eat them_ afterwards."

"Yeah, there's a reason for that. After they mate, if the females don't kill them fast enough, the males turn into something a lot _worse_. We used to call them Chickenheads."

Ayash looked up anxiously, "Chickenheads?"

"Because of the way they moved their heads. Like giant chickens pecking at the ground. They're funny looking, but they're bad news. Even the reavers were scared of them."

"Then it's a good thing Lieutenant Onise hasn't mated with any of the reavers," Marcus said, extracting a bone marrow sample from his left arm using a medical core drill, "And if this experiment succeeds, he never _will_."

"You have no idea what you're getting yourselves into..."

"Let's get started." Ayash pushed the memory card into a reader slot on the side of the tractor beam and moved its swingarm over to an examination table in the corner. Doctor Marcus joined him after a moment with a tricorder and three small vials of tissue samples she'd just extracted from Onise's body: one blood, one of bone marrow and one taken from deep in his distended abdomen where part of the reaver-tumor had pushed three of his ribs half a foot out of his chest like a mountain of meat and bone. "We should know right away if there's any effect," Marcus said, "Program for Z-band modulation. We'll do the reaver tissue first."

"If you don't mind," Miri moved towards the door, "I've got an obsessive compulsive Orion girl to deal with. I'll see you in a f-" she froze as the doors opened in front of her, partly in shock from the blast of warm humid air that filtered into the room even through the double-layered quarantine field leading to the rest of the ship. It felt like stepping out of a refrigerator into a sauna.

The feeling of heat had made her stop and pause, but someone who hadn't been expecting the pause bumped into her from behind on his way through the door. Miri didn't give it much thought for the first instant, but in rapid succession she suddenly realized that there was no one else in the Iso-Lab except for Ayash and Marcus and both of them were on the opposite side of the room. More out of curiosity than anything else she whirled around to see who exactly had bumped her, and out of the corner of her eyes saw something move past her that wasn't _completely_ there.

It was just a ripple, almost a man-shaped mirage moving casually through the air, like the way a man might stroll through a park or a market looking for nothing in particular. She wasn't even sure she was really seeing it at all - perhaps it was just a heat shimmer from cold dry air mixing with warm humid air? - until she remembered seeing this exact same pattern once before, down on the surface of her duplicate world. Then, as now, she'd thought it was merely a mirage, but even Spock had confirmed that _something_ had been there, something that didn't fully register on their sensors. Something possibly hostile that was monitoring their progress from under concealment...

The 2089 biography of Miriam Hallab pointed out that her instinct for self-preservation frequently overwhelmed her sense of discretion, and this time was no different. The instant she perceived the image as a threat, she drew her hand phaser out of her belt, dialed it up to its highest setting and fired at the middle of what she imagined was this thing's chest. In doing so, the "mirage" in front of her suddenly flickered into the shape of a perfectly visible person, who instantly folded over backwards as the phaser burned a fist-sized hole in his chest. The newly-dead intruder was wearing some kind of body armor, with a large bulbous helmet and camouflage colors that otherwise might be mistaken for twenty first century battle dress... except for the icon of the bright green raptor painted on the top of the helmet, and the fact that the wearer was now lying in a pool of dark green blood.

Three other "mirages" that Miri hadn't noticed until now made sudden ducking motions, drawing unseen weapons from unseen holsters. Instinctively, she dove back through the doorway as the three fired their phasers directly over her head. A salvo of speeding fireballs sliced through the air like tracer bullets, each carrying with them the energy of a hand grenade. Several of them exploded against the far bulkhead of the isolation lab, blasting furniture and lab equipment about the room like a chain of grenades. One of the equipment racks in their path exploded in a shower of sparks and tumbled a few feet until it knocked Doctor Marcus' legs out from under her and sent her spinning to the deck. Marcus reached for the nearest thing in range to stop her fall, which unfortunately turned out to be the surgical tractor beam on its swing arm; the arm rebounded and swung itself back to its default position, and the newly-modulated energy beam snapped into action directly into the middle of Lieutenant Onise's chest.

Half a second later, the Isolation Lab flared up as if a bucket of firecrackers had been setoff on the examination table. Sounds of confusion were heard in at least four distinct languages, overlapping phonemes in Romulan, Arabic, English and Hesperian. Lastly came something that was neither a voice nor a language, just a primal scream of rage and power from the creature that used to be Lieutenant Kenbi Onise.


End file.
